Sphere Displacement

I’m having one of those moments and after some searching without resolution I decided to ask everyone on here…How can I create a displacement in the shape of a sphere? It doesn’t have to be a complete sphere but that would be nice. I 'm doing a beaded wallcovering texture and creating individual spheres (even proxies) would be overkill. I cannot figure out what the gradient should look like. Thanks.

The easiest would be creating a set of a few spheres, render them from an orthogonal camera, add a z-depth renderelement and use the z-depth element as gradient for the displacement.

Regards,
Thorsten

Do you have a reference image??

It essentially looks like a radial gradient you might make in Photoshop, but Thorsten’s method is the best/easiest way IMO. Radial gradients tend to give pointed cones more than domes.

b

you could also use a gradient ramp set to radial, remove the middle flag, and then enable the output rollout and tweak the curve into half an arc.

Nice one Percy!

Thanks for all of your suggestions. The attached link shows what I am trying to create.

http://cart.mayaromanoff.com/IW\_Products.m4p.pvx?;MULTI\_ITEM\_SUBMIT

Nicely done Percy !!!

The link goes to a login screen.

Sorry for the link. Here is another link showing the full wallcovering as well as a close-up sample. Thanks.

http://decorati.com/product/22199/bijou

interesting wallpaper. I’d probably create a normal map and use it instead of displacement. It sounds like a nightmare if you use displacement.

you could do it easily with VRayscatter if you have a map of the pattern

This is what I am working with now. I rendered a grey sphere with a tube around it just with environment lighting. I set the tube to be invisible to the camera because I just needed some shadows on the sphere. I then took the rendered image into photoshop and created a brush from the sphere and painted my texture. I am using this as a bump map now and it is working okay. I then created an opacity map for the beads. I duplicated the geometry and offset it a little bit so the back texture is the solid beige wall texture and the duplicated geometry is the bead texture with an opacity map applied. The problem is that the wallcovering is on a huge wall that is somewhat in the distance so the pattern (18"X18") looks small and I am losing some of the detail. Thanks again for all of your help. I appreciate it.