Subdivide surface of extruded object / some clever work around

[Jordan Quackenbush]

What about just separating the vector out for France (or whichever question) and making that a new object & applying textures/elevation to it? Then have one object for the map as a whole, but missing France?

I haven’t done elevation stuff before, so I don’t know if that would mess it all up or not. Additionally, you might be able to make the whole thing editable polygons & separate out France that way.

Jordan Q
If I’m posting a question, it means I’ve Googled it for far too long and couldn’t find a solution/answer.

[Stuart Paciej]

Back to answer the question for anyone else that might come across this:

1.
Extrude or loft your spline path, but change the cap from NGons to quadrangles.

2.
Tick regular grid and subdivide as you see fit

3.
If you used extrude, make editable and take the Cap 1 object you just created.
If you used loft then it should just make a cap

4.
Select all polygons and do a tiny tiny extrude inwards, like -0.001 or something. Now right click and use the extrusion tool and drag your newly created polys up and you’ll have an extruded object with a subdivided cap

5.
When you did step 4 you should have created a polygon selection tag called C1. Drag your displacement material on to the object and apply it only to the C1 selection.

6.
Now add a displacement deformer and nest it under your object. Set the shading to the same channel as your material (e.g. I have my displacement image on the luminance channel) drag your texture tag that you applied in step 4 into the empty box under the displacer’s shading channel.

Hey presto! Long winded I know.