The displacement plug-in is a great add-on to Rhino 4 but is also pretty buggy. The integration into Rhino 5 is much smoother and has a much better interface and option set.
Displacement maps are typically, but not always, black and white with grey tones defining levels of transitions. You can make your own quite quickly or just use Photoshop’s desaturate option (PC=ctrl+u, Mac=Command+U) to an image with good levels of gray. A good image will have lots of variance such as:
Notice the smooth levels of gray in between the black and white? That will give you a smoother transition between your high points (white) and low points (black). You can use colored images as well, but you are leaving the levels up to the computer to distinguish and will be less accurate in most cases.
The plug-in can be found here.
If you’ve never installed a plug-in before, you can find my handy little guide here.
Is this implemented in the Mac WIP?
Hi Chad, From the way I understand it, the dev team at McNeel has made it so, technically, yes you can have plug-ins that work for Rhino WIP for Mac. However it is up to the person who wrote the plug-in to port it over to the Mac version. Since it is included as a function within Rhinoceros 5 for Windows, I’m going to guess that it will be included eventually as an update for the WIP. In the meantime, I’d recommend trying the “Heightfield” command as it affects the mesh in a similar way. – http://www.rhino3d.com/4/help/commands/heightfield.htm
ok, thank you. I am familiar with that command, but never tried playing with it.
Will heightfield not work with existing geometry?
Unfortunately, I don’t think it does. I believe it relies on the surface that is built within the command. Tomorrow’s video will discuss the command a little. Stay tuned!
This is great, Gabriel. Very helpful.
Hi Cosmasad,
Happy to help!
Enjoy,
G