Displacement Maps-Digital Media 2

Students learned how to create displacement maps from textured images and how to blend graphics with the maps in Photoshop. What is a displacement map you ask? Here’s the definition from Wikipedia.

“Displacement mapping is an alternative computer graphics technique in contrast to bump mapping, normal mapping, and parallax mapping, using a (procedural-) texture- or height map to cause an effect where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are displaced, often along the local surface normal, according to the value the texture function evaluates to at each point on the surface. It gives surfaces a great sense of depth and detail, permitting in particular self-occlusion, self-shadowing and silhouettes.”

Even if you still don’t understand how it works, you can see what it does by looking at the samples below.