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by Matthew Holewinski
Introduction:
Sculpting objects with images
The process of re-shaping a 3D form with a 2D image is called image-based displacement and is executed with the Displacement tool in form•Z. This tool is used to “imprint” an image on the surface of an object. The points of meshes are moved relative to the gray color intensity of an image, which displaces the surface geometrically. The mesh on the object may already exist or may be created by the displacement process.
This resembles the bump effects of rendering, where an image is used to make a surface appear sculpted.
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For example, the mortar joints of a brick texture can be made to look three dimensional with a brick bump map when rendered. However, there is a major difference between the two techniques. Bump mapping simply adds a depth illusion during rendering and does not affect the geometry of a surface, which image-based displacement does.
Any grayscale or color image of any supported format will work, such as (TIFF, TGA, JPG, PNG, BMP, etc.). Note if you use a color image, the pixel intensity value is used, not the color values. More predictable results can be achieved by converting your color image into grayscale.
Three examples of objects sculpted with image-based displacements are shown below.
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