Displacement - Colour by Z?

[schroeder]

Hi Everyone,

I'm wondering if there's a way, using vraydisplacement, to apply a colour ramp to a displaced surface in the Z direction?

For instance, displacing a radial gradient (created in photoshop), and having the base of the displaced surface be red, and the top green? Or displacing grass, and having the base of the blades be a light green, and the tips a much darker green?

I'd upload an image but I'm away form the office and this just came to mind.

Thanks for your ideas.

Andrew

[Morbid Angel]

I think what you are talking of is arbitary displacement. Which used RGB values for directions, rather then grey values. If so, vray current does not support this. MR does with special extra shaders.

[schroeder]

Hey Morbid,

Nope, I'm talking about standard displacement, in one direction, as vray currently supports.

If you can imagine displacing a landscape, I need the valleys to be coloured green, and as you go higher in elevation for the colour to approach blueish-white, using custom colours set along a standard max gradient ramp.

I doubt that makes anymore sense, but hopefully it does. What I'm after is the interactivity of adjusting the elevation colours by using the max gradient ramp interface.

Andrew

[percydaman]

yes he's looking to extract a 'z' direction from his displacement so he can map it.

[vlado]

Since the displacement map directly determines the height of the displacement, you can use this as the source for a gradient ramp map to get this effect.

Best regards,
Vlado

[schroeder]

Bingo. That worked like a charm, I can't believe that I've never used that before. Thanks Vlado.

[3ddesign]

Schroeder,

Could you explain what you did and show the results? This sounds very interesting.

Craig

[Pixelab]

Schroeder,

Could you explain what you did and show the results? This sounds very interesting.

Craig

I guess you take the texture used for the displacement, you grandient-ramp it in Photoshop... then you put the result in a the diffuse slot of the material applied to the object that has the displacement modifier on it...

Useful technique

[vlado]

Eh, not exactly what I had in mind although this will also work... The Gradient Ramp texture in 3ds Max has a "Mapped" mode in which you can use another grayscale "Source Map" texture to drive the gradient.

Best regards,
Vlado

[schroeder]

Eh, not exactly what I had in mind although this will also work... The Gradient Ramp texture in 3ds Max has a "Mapped" mode in which you can use another grayscale "Source Map" texture to drive the gradient.

Best regards,
Vlado

Yup, I did it the way vlado mentioned. The gradient ramp uses the same input bitmap that the displacement modifier uses, only the gradient ramp allows you to control the diffuse colour by applying the gradient to the greyscale input bitmap.

Maybe I'll post something if this doesn't make sense.