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Displacement Map Issues
Hey all-
I’m trying to take a map of the world and use displacement maps to segment it into cubes. I want to use a gradient map to control the height of the cubes depending on where they are on the map. (Think topographic map, but instead of contoured steps, the height it displayed in cubes.)
I was able to get somewhat close to the effect real quick using a custom gradient map from photoshop, and a plane.
When it comes to the map, well…. that’s a whole different story.
This is kinda close to the effect I’m going for.
This is the map, once the extrude nurbs was converted to a polygon.
This is the result… (with the same displacement map as the first image.)
Any thoughts?
Thanks!-
BS———-
Brian Smith
http://www.renderedhero.com
PDX, ORYGUN -
4 Replies
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Another quick note…
I thought of using some sort of cloner object to create a field of cubes in the shape of the map, and then try and figure out a way to adjust the heights individually. I used a MoGraph cloner object, and that just made a bunch of cubes that outlined the paths (which is kinda what it is supposed to do… I know). If there’s another cloner type or setting that I could use for this, that would be cool too.
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Brian Smith
http://www.renderedhero.com
PDX, ORYGUN -
You’re going to have problems applying subpolygon displacement to geometry derived from nurbs because SPD requires all-quad geometry with regular polygon size for best results. You can improve the result by selecting quads and regular grid in your extrude caps’ properties before converting.
What you might try instead is applying the displacement to a plane, knocking out the non-map geometry with an alpha.
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I would apply the cloner to a plane and then use a shader effector to either scale the non-map clones to zero, or use the visibility checkbox.
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Hey Adam-
Thanks for your help on this. I figured out a good solution to my problem. It wasn’t quite as streamlined as I was looking for, but it worked nonetheless.I have been using a vector path from Illustrator as my ExtrudeNURBS path. I went back through the other maps available, and found one that was made of dots. I converted all those dots (circle paths) to square, and imported that. It made a lot of paths to deal with, so I just broke them up into continents and connect all the paths leaving me with 7 objects. Then I just used the “FFD” deformer to adjust the cube height. This seems to work fine for my purposes here. This whole thing will eventually be built in Papervision in Flash, so this is really in comp stages right now.
Thanks for your help!
BS
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Brian Smith
http://www.renderedhero.com
PDX, ORYGUN
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