Quote - > Quote - > 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.

yes. this is also in blender. you import a black and white image and you can change the whole model with the ''displ'' map. its in real time. it changed the mesh. it will not have details but it will change it. 

Exactly! And it can be exported as a morph target, or stored as 'hard' data - meaning the vertex xyz information, rather then stored as displacement values in an image, and only available during rendering.

If one really wants to split hairs, it can be argues at whih point the 'illusion' starts. Some high lama people will succesfully argue that illusion starts when you hit 'Render' button. Others will have different views.

What bothers me the most about what happened here is that Luke was trying to do something really nice, and got reamed out like he was doing something really bad. :rolleyes:  As if there's a hard consensus on how to define displacement.

Heck, Poser only gives you half the displacement abilities most other applications do. I'd hardly see it as the authority on displacement definition, or much of other 3D stuff. That's probably why displacement is so hard to grasp within poserdom, you only get to see half of it's functionality.

Some people really do need to peek outside the poser box on occasion. I think educating people into thinking Poser is the authority on 3D only does them disservice. Many of those people get burned when trying to participate in other 3D communities (and a large number of Poser users do), and exhibit this attitude elsewhere.

IRRC, within max, you can also tessalate the mesh to refine it for displacement effect.
It's been a little while since I used that functionality, so I could be remembering it wrong. In the past I used displacement quite often to create terrain models - which had to be edited later, to add different thigns to them, like roads, bridges, building pads and various changes. I often work across several applications to accomplish something, so I could be remembering this functionality from another ap... I'm at least 50% sure it's in Max too.

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