This turned out kinda cool!
I made(in Photoshop) a 16 bit greyscale displace map like this (attached jpeg)...

And then I applied it with a spherical projection to a sphere (Ball) set it to displacement and tweeked the value... came up with this neat 'helicopter fisheye over the cityscape' effect.

V15 displacement feature is the BOMB!

Nice! Cool idea!

Is there difference between V14 and V15 displacement?

That's very impressive and promising

As far as I know....no.

Well, I remember that there were problems with the camera being too close to a surface; it would clip the geometry and make it look like there was a chunk missing. I didn't notice it in your fly by.

That's something I'm looking out for with these eXtreme displace values (15,000+) That's not really a problem, just something to expect. I am noticing that as my camera gets closer to the ball render times double, then double again...and again...

Very cool, Matt!!
I tried something similar for my Atlantis project but because of the inabilty to accurately map surface details onto the walls, (windows, doors, etc.), I abandoned it. Still very useful for many things. Now we just need some way of turning this displacement into geometry.

nice effect

Looks Cool.

Are the black lines that race along the edges something to do with the camera being close?

I'm looking in to that. They are partly because i did some scaling to my buildings in Photoshop that introduced anti-aliasing. Also partly due to a 2 pass multipass render...I am rendering again using 9 passes hoping to lessen that artifact.

Matt

Cool now make it with letters and we could have an old ibm typewrite head printing onto the screen

JohnL..(full of ideas or full of....)(no this is not a poll)

Just a question: Is there a possibility to map the displacement of the surface in any way in its height?
Lets say you wanted to add windows to the buildings... is that in any way possible?

*Fuchur*

JohnL3D----- Good idea!
Fucher----In a word....No. In two words...no-no. That's simply not possibly with this approach, you would need to model everything to get detail in that direction.

Is displacement in V15 any different than in v14 or v13?

I 'think' it was rewritten anew in V14,,,and V15 just carried it over. For SOME reason I have been stuck using V15 on all my latest work ever since I d'loaded it...it works GREAT I might add.

Windows are possible only on surfaces with a slope of degree less than 90. For any accuracy, larger scale maps would have to be generated; windows would be drawn on the buffer between summit and base provided bilinear expansion was used to stretch the gradient.

YEAH! (what???)


anywhoo! I'm going to try to use this effect this upcoming week in a news-style graphic for an 'urban' media reporter...I'll post the result.

This is a quick attempt use a color decal black with small columns of white noise over your posted displacment decal but it seems to interfere with displacement


Click to view attachment


slightly better used your decal on a 4x4 grid and modified version (little squares changed to white) and used as a projection map


Click to view attachment

How about a material instead of a decal. Tricky to make but a material wouldn't care about the slope of a surface.

Could be 'my bad'...I forgot to mention that I used a 300dpi 16bit greyscale pong file, which I -1)downsized 2)jpegged and 3) RGB 8 bit converted. I posted the image just to show what caused the displacing.

Okay so we got a downsized jpegged rgb 8 bit example...but that explains the better results you had