Displacement mapping

Displacement mapping is a technique used in computer graphics that allows for the storage of higher-frequency details of a model in a texture rather than within the mesh itself. This technique can potentially improve upon the standard vertex skinning technique. Displacement mapping involves four steps: triangular mesh division, elaborate element mesh subdivision, texture elevation mapping, and coordinate transformation. Unlike bump mapping, displacement mapping actually deforms the geometry of a surface.From: Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 [2019], Research on elaborate image simulation method for close-range space target [2023], Computer Graphics [2019]

Accurate and Detailed Image-Based 3D Documentation of Large Sites and Complex Objects

View Chapter

Purchase Book

Published in Filippo Stanco, Sebastiano Battiato, Giovanni Gallo, Digital Imaging for Cultural Heritage Preservation, 2017

Filippo Stanco, Sebastiano Battiato, Giovanni Gallo

In computer graphics applications, the texturing can also be performed with techniques able to graphically modify the derived 3D geometry (displacement mapping) or simulating the surface irregularities without touching the geometry (bump mapping, normal mapping, parallax mapping).

Hybrid design and prototyping of metamaterials and metasurfaces

View Article

Journal Information

Published in Virtual and Physical Prototyping, 2022

Francisco Franco-Martínez, Christian Grasl, Erik Kornfellner, Matthias Vostatek, Adrián Martínez Cendrero, Francesco Moscato, Andrés Díaz Lantada

3D Coat (Pilgway) is used as digital sculpting software to generate real printable topographies by mapping previously generated greyscale masks upon the surfaces of three-dimensional CAD models. CAD texturing is normally performed following two main families of methods, bump or texture mapping and displacement mapping. The former modify the surface normals of designed objects and use the perturbed normals during light calculations, to simulate bumps and wrinkles and achieve realistic rendering, but without actually modifying the surface geometry. The latter apply heightmaps to cause a real effect (including a modified stl file for printing purposes), by displacing points or voxels of the designed surfaces, according to the value of the heightmap applied to each point of the surface. 3D Coat enables both approaches but, in this study, we resort to the real surface modifications achievable through displacement mapping for the third step of the design process.

Displacement mapping

Explore chapters and articles related to this topic

Accurate and Detailed Image-Based 3D Documentation of Large Sites and Complex Objects

Hybrid design and prototyping of metamaterials and metasurfaces