An experiment at making dragon style spikes with displacement mapping. Semi- successful.

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Semi ,I would have said that was very sucsesfull ,excellant

I agree with Steve392, that is way more than semi-successful. Rob, you know I've been working on getting a handle decal and bump maps. Could you possibly post the greyscale image that used for that displacement map? I don't wanna steal it, just wanna study it.

If you follow one of the top spikes all the way around you'll see some oddness, which is why I say semi-successful.



Here you go. They generally have to be EXR to avoid banding. you can open it in A:M to see it.

Click to view attachment

Looks good! They seem to change shape though in the renderer though. Hey, if you animate the strength of the displacement, do the spikes grow? I never though of trying that before.

Yes. This shows the percentage going from -1000 to +1000

The first half is with the original map that didn't have the base color close to middle gray. The second half is after I adjusted it in Photoshop.

Click to view attachment

I opened the EXR image in A:M. My computer tried to open it with an expired demo version of Photoshop that I downloaded some time back. I have Corel but it doesn't recognize the file extension. (Stupid me, what is the EXR format, anyway?)

Did you create the original image in Photoshop?

Thanks, Rob

I can see that last file working very well on a werewolf transformation as an example.

There's a photoshop plugin on the OpenEXR site that might work with other software.




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR




I modeled one spike and scattered several of them on a flat surface. I shot that with an overhead camera with fog settings to make the near to far gradate from white to grey. I rendered that to the exr frame and cylinder wrapped that image on the basic shape.