Not a new technique, you can find good tutorials by Bertand Benoit and Philippe Steels here and here, but it remains the best way to create displacement maps for repetitive things like roof tiles, metal panels and in this case expanded metal mesh. The great thing about doing a material like this with displacement rather than a straight opacity map is that it looks different depending on the viewing angle, which adds to the realism.
I made a quick model of expanded metal that looks something like this:
then did a quick top-down render and saved the zdepth element as a 16 bit png. Its important to save as 16 bit if you want a nice clean and smooth displacement, 8 bit often doesnt have enough grey levels so you get a stepped gradient which looks ugly when displaced.
This is what the finished displacement map looks like:
If you use vray, then the displacement settings were (units: mm) :
The actual material settings were very simple, a brownish diffuse colour, slightly more pink reflect colour, ward brdf
And finally some renders (click for higher res):
Tags: displacement, freebie
Nice. Does the top render have glass behind the mesh?
Thanks Dan, both renders have glass in front and behind the mesh.
Just the simple advice of using a 16bit png will make a massive difference. I have being using 8bit’s (doh) which can look a bit messy on close and far away shots! Thanks Peter.
WoW very nice thanks man
This looks fantastic, Peter.
Why does the displacement map leaves holes where it’s black? (is that a stupid thing to ask actually?)
Hi Peter,
Great tutorial!
I just don’t think that there is glass on the outside of the facade :).. Usually it doesn’t even cover the windows
@ Willem its not leaving holes to get the holes i think you need to put the displace texture in the opacity slot as well and use displacement or am I just wrong?
@ vuk: yeah i guess it needs an opacity map too…
thanks peter for yet again an excellent tip!
No opacity map needed, the water level of vraydispmod takes care of that
Lol I’m still a newbi apparently:) thnx Peter!
inspired by http://www.archdaily.com/62543/condominio-m-cc04studio/09_viamarmilla/ ?:-)
very nice tutorial!
@ vuk, the water level feature of vray displacement is very handy, takes a bit of experimenting to get the right value for it though!
@ robertj, looks nice, but was more inspired by Chipperfield’s De Moines public library
Hahaha, nice coincidence, I recently did some expanded metal textures. Same initial method but I tried the normal map method instead of displace and it turned out nice, but pretty tricky to adjust. I’ll share it when I’ll have time (maybe never
Just wondering, do you also have many clients asking you expanded metal facades recently ? Just a new temporary architectural trend or just a “new” material emerging ?
Nice renders !
Thank You
looks good, but would be even better if vray figured out a way to make the water level follow the displacement, instead of just being a simple clipping plane.
Just a shoutout to say ‘mad respect!’ again. Where do you get your textures from? You’ve got some really nice tones to your renderings, kind of pale and muted, which I love.
Keep it up, man.
hello, quality of image is awsome:)
can y post final setting for image quality, y used? I always try differend settings, but still have not satysfing quality, have bad aa, dirt regions and grain. I read vray help, but still cant do things right.
Hi Peter, Thank you very much for your tutorial
I have a little question about VrayDisplacementMod, how to prevent that my texture tile ? Because I have uncheck “tile” in my bitmap and the displacement is tilling in render. I don’t know why. My screenshot to show you http://uppix.3dvf.com/?v=vraydispla.jpg
I’m french sorry for my english
Thank’s a lot Peter.
@dzejdzej I will see if i can find the scene
@adrien I dont think you can stop that, you might need to just split the geometry
@tom I usually make my textures from scratch (photos) or arroway.de !
hello peter, it is a great tutorial but i wonder if with this technic allow me to do a very close up image of this expanded metal and it still looks realistic.
I am thinking to do that with a net of a chair that i am modelling.
Thanks for your help
Hi Hose, yes, I think it would work well even for close ups.
Peter
Hi Peter, is it possible to combine Vray Dicplacement Mod with a UVW map of a texture in a different size on the same plane?