Maya® Studio Projects Texturing and Lighting

Displacement Maps

Displacement maps distort geometry at the point of render. That is, the assigned surface is tessellated, and the resulting vertices are translated. The distance the vertices are translated is based on values within the source texture. Although displacement maps are processor intensive, they are more realistic than bump maps. As such, displacement maps provide two main advantages:

• The surface's silhouette is displaced.
• Displaced details cast and receive shadows.

Displacement maps cannot be created through the standard material connections. Instead, you must connect a Displacement Shader to a shading group node. Follow these steps:

1. Select a material node in the Hypershade and open its Attribute Editor tab. Click the Go To Output ...