Quick Displacement

The Quick Displacement operator allows you to displace a mesh object using either noise or image textures. This is a destructive process but allows you to create displacement effects faster minus the dedicated functionalites of more focused plugins like A.N.T. Landscape.

Figure 1

Clicking on the operator will show you the redo panel and will wait for your input to start the operation. As you can see, there are a lot of properties but don't be intimated by the number of controls because they can be segmented into parts that share a common functionality.

Here are the redo properties and what they do:

Type

This determines what texture you want for displacement. You can choose either Cloud which uses the cloud texture in Blender or Image which uses images loaded up in Blender.

You can easily load images to Blender using the Load Image(s) operator designed mainly for the Quick Displacement operator.

Noise Basis

This will show up if you have selected Cloud for the Type property. This will let you choose which type of noise texture you want for the displacement.

Figure 2

Image

This will show up if you have selected Image for the Type property. This will let you select which image texture loaded up in Blender you want for the displacement.

Mode

This property determines which faces are going to be displacement. All Faces will displace all faces in the mesh and Selection will only displace the faces you have selected in edit mode.

Figure 3

Smoothing

These properties will only show up if you have Selection for the Mode property and is composed of the Size and Expand properties.

Figure 4

The Size property will allow you to shrink the size of the affected displaced area.

The Size property will now work if the selection is the entire number of faces in a mesh or mesh island.

The Expand property will allow you to soften the edges of the displaced selection. This will only work if the Size property is also working.

Figure 5

Coordinates

This will let you choose between Object or UV mapping for the displacement texture.

Strength

This determines the strength of the displacement.

Figure 6

Midlevel

Texture values which ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 in Blender will not result in displacement when below this threshold. Basically, this raises or lowers the displacement level of the mesh based on the luminosity of the displacement texture.

Figure 7

Size

The size of the displacement texture.

Depth

Depth of the cloud calculation. This only shows up when using Type: Cloud.

Figure 9

Filter Size

This softens the displacement effect. This is only available for Type: Images.

Figure 10

Brightness

Adjusts the brightness of the displacement texture.

Figure 11

Contrast

Adjusts the contrast of the displacement texture.

Figure 12

The Brightness and Contrast properties were exposed to act like colorramps to modify the luminosity values of the textures which determines the height of the displacement.

Smooth

The strength of smoothing applied to the subdivided mesh.

Figure 13

Repeat

Number of times to repeat the smoothing.

Figure 14

Location / Rotation / Scale

Figure 15

In Figure 6, the highlighted area contains the transform properties of the displacement texture. Here, you can control its Location, Rotation and Scale in the X, Y and Z axis. You can also randomize these transformations using the per axis random seed properties.

Figure 16

When using the random seed value of 1, there will be no randomization and the exact value of the properties will be used. Only if you go up to 2 and above will the random seed take effect.

Subdivision

This is comprised of two properties namely: Cuts and Smooth.

The Cuts property lets you set the number of subdivisions to the mesh which will generate more faces for the displacement to work with. Basically, the more subdivision you have to more precise the details will be but be careful since using too much will slow down the operation.

Figure 17

The Smooth property lets you smooth the effect of subdividing the mesh. This is different from the Smooth property above which operates on the basemesh itself and not the subdivided result.

Figure 18

This smoothing property is not the same as the one above that can be repeated. This is a part of the subdivision algorithm and smooths the subdivision while the earlier version smooths the mesh after the subdivision.

Noise

This is composed of two properties namely: Fractal and Normal.

These properties are still tied to the Subdivision property above and will let you generate noise on the subdivided mesh.

Fractal controls the randomness factor of randomly offseting vertices.

Figure 19

Normal will let you apply the fractal displacement on face normals only.

Figure 20

Noise Seed

The random seed value to control the randomization of the fractal displacement in the subdivided mesh.

Figure 21

Subsuf Level

This is the level of the subdivision modifier added to the displaced mesh object. This is attached to the mesh after the displacement effect or the operator has been processed.

Figure 22

Object Scale / Rotation

Figure 23

In Figure 23, the highlighted area contains the transform properties of the displaced object. Here, you can control its Rotation and Scale in the X, Y and Z axis. You can also randomize these transforms using the per axis random seed properties.

Figure 24

There is no location transform here because there is no need to modify the position of the active or displaced object.

When using the random seed value of 1, there will be no randomization and the exact value of the properties will be used. Only if you go up to 2 and above will the random seed take effect.

In the object scaling, when using the random seed value of 1, the highest between the min and max values will be used for the transform.