Using displacement without changing the shape of objects

Lightwave's displacement feature uses an image to displace points along one of the 3 axes (X, Y or Z). In the pin toy example at right, each pin is displaced, but the pin’s shape is not distorted, as you would normally expect.

To achieve this I used a UV texture for the displacement. Each group of points, which make up a single pin, has been collapsed to a single point in the UV map. Therefore all the points in each pin move as a single unit.

I created the hand shaped displacement texture by rendering a view of a hand object. I used the Buffer Export plugin to create an image of the Depth buffer. The Buffer Export command is located in Lightwave 7.5 on the Scene tab, Generics pop-up menu.

-Joe Lertola, October 2004