OTOY Forums

HI everyone,

I wonder if anyone could explain how to do a negative displacement on a text logo texture? At the moment, I'm inverting the image, but all that does is raise the outside part, which obviously screws with the model. Is there a way to deboss my lettering without "lifting" the rest of the texture?

Please explain like you're talking to a five year old, because I'm pretty new to Octane!!

You probably have your Mid Level set to zero, and the full range of possible displacement is represented by 0-1. Think of the Mid Level as the default surface of your material. Since the Height value (think "total possible displacement distance") can only be a positive number, if Mid Level is set to zero, then there is no room below that to deboss into. Say you have your Height set to 10. With a Mid Level of zero, you can use your texture map to extrude positively 10 units, but none, negatively. If instead of zero, you set your Mid Level to 0.5, then your texture can extrude a maximum of 5 units positively and five units negatively, based on the range of your texture, dark going negative and light going positive, with 50% gray being the original surface.

It's usually worthwhile to use 16 or 32 bit grayscale images for displacement for more finely controlled surfaces without stair stepping.

I hope that helps. It's the end of the day and my mind is far from sharp at the moment.