Displacement


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Displacement is the process of surface deformation based on bump-factors. These are usually greyscale values of textures. Displacement can be seen as the sequel to bump-mapping wherein only the normal vectors of compound surface nodes are adjusted based on the bump-factor. During displacement the nodes are translated (displaced) along their normal vectors.

The plugin comes with two commands:
·DisplaceMesh  
·RetextureMesh  

The first one will displace mesh-vertices based on an existing image file and displacement settings.
The latter will reapply mesh-texture coordinates based on closest-point relation to an existing nurbs surface guide. Not all meshes in Rhino are required to have texture coordinates and with the retexture command you can apply texture coordinates to empty meshes.

Zip_file_icon 24.4 K

Displacement_Zero Displacement_One
Displacement_Two Displacement_Three
Increasing displacement values

Displacement_V4
The plugin will display the displaced mesh dynamically while the command
is still running. It can display wireframe meshes, vertices, shaded meshes,
textured meshes and deviation false color (seen above).

The plugin accepts values for black and white extremes in model units.
You can thus displace a mesh inwards, outwards or both and inverted as well.

The sampling of brighness values from the source image occurs with
a certain accuracy. By default the accuracy is 100% which means every
mesh vertex is associated with the pixel that shares it's relative
UV-coordinates. If you lower the accuracy the vertex will base
it's bump-factor on adjacent pixels as well, resulting in a smoother
displacement.
PriorToDisplacement
Original geometry

PostDisplacement PostDisplacementBlurred
Displaced with 100% and 10% accuracy respectively.

Accuracy
Sampled pixels per vertex

(100/Accuracy)²
100%
1
50%
4
25%
16
20%
25
15%
44.5
10%
100
5%
400
1%
10.000




 

For additional information.