Quote - Here's another experiment, which makes no sense unless the mesh has moved.

My big sphere is now made of glass. There are two small decorated spheres. The lower one is being refracted through the glass of the displaced lobe. How is that possible if it isn't really there? How do you explain why the two smaller balls do not appear identical, if the lobe isn't really there between the camera and the little sphere?

If the renderer was just moving the glass pixels to the right, we wouldn't see the sphere through it because in that case it isn't really behind the glass.

This is not an illusion as you described it.

I think Luke meant that displacement doesn't permanently move the mesh (in a way a magnet or a morph brush would).

In 3DS Max and few other high end programs there is Shader based Displacement, like what you get in Poser. Then there's also displacement based modifiers that can be used in mesh modeling. Those actually do change the mesh, in a way a magnet or a morph would in Poser.

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