Is there a tutorial on displacement maps?

pwiecek

Is there a tutorial somewhere that teaches how to make gradients to use as displacement maps?

I know a an artist who has stated that high resolution bump and displacement maps are much better for fine detail than morphs.

This is the kind of information i'm looking for:

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/3269/

This tutorial is great, but is there anything else on creating the bump maps to begin with

Thanks

Richard Haseltine

Don't restrict yourself to Poser or DS - displacement and bump work in much the same way across pretty well all applications, as long as they support sub-/micro-polygon displacement at all.

As for the superiority of bump and displacement over morphs, it depends what you are doing - bump just changes how light affects the surface, displacement moves the surface in or out at right-angles to the surface but can't generate overhangs (vector displacement can, but DS and Poser don't do that without fiddling in the shader set up) - the advantage of displacement over regular morphs (not the new HD morphs in DS, but the tools for those aren't available) is that it supports much finer detail. People usually use a mixture of morphs to get the overall shape and displacement for fine detail.

pwiecek

I'm going to use the maps in poser.

I'll consider any program to create the gradient and export it as a 16 bit/channel tiff.