How to Use the DISPLACE MODIFIER In Blender! (Step by Step Tutorial)

oh what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out one of the more fun modifiers inside a blender the displaced modifier let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so basically what the displace modifier does is it takes the vertices of a mesh and it moves them around inside of the 3d space by doing this you can use either noise or image textures or a lot of different things in order to create really interesting results inside a blender so let's take a look at some examples so if you have a simple surface like this one right i tab into it there's nothing in there no geometric detail anything like that and you apply the modifier to it so you can go over to the add modifier in your modifier settings so click on the little wrench add modifier displace right here notice how nothing interesting is happening right so something is happening but it's not very interesting so notice how basically what it's doing is it's displacing or it's moving the vertices of this object in the normal direction in the 3d space so what it's doing is it's taking this whole thing when it's moving around but because it's applying all of this individually to every vertex in the object you're just getting this kind of like movement inside of the 3d space right so it's just moving everything which is not really what we want same thing would happen if we applied or added a displaced modifier to the sphere right it's just going to like displace everything out but it's all going to be at the same rate and so what we need to do is we need to tell blender where to apply that modifier so for example let's say that we were to tab into this object i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to subdivide it and we'll go ahead and subdivide it to a level of we'll call it 10 for right now but notice how at the moment still nothing's changed but if we come in here and we create like a vertex group right so i'm going to create a vertex group right here and we'll just go into object data properties add a vertex group we'll just call this test group right here and we'll leave the weight at one right now and we'll click on assign well now if i go back into edit mode and inside of this modifier i tell this to just displace the vertex group notice what that's going to do is that's going to displace the vertices in here that have weight applied to them right so it's taking these vertices and it's moving them upwards right here so this starts getting a little bit interesting because what if we go in here and we go into weight paint mode so i'm going to tab in edit mode i'm going to go to weight paint mode and i'm gonna go ahead and apply some kind of like random weights in here right something like this so basically what i'm doing is i'm taking that vertex group and i'm applying some additional weight in here like this well what that means is that means that it's now going to apply this effect to multiple different vertices so now if i go back into object mode and take a look at this notice how this is now displacing that geometry in here in all of the locations where there's weight applied to the vertices and so you can adjust the strength and the mid level to adjust how far this is being displaced inside your 3d space so that's a little bit more interesting right but what's even more interesting than that is if you've ever used a displacement modifier you know that in addition to being able to affect the strength you can also click on this button right here to use a texture in order to displace your object so let's say we were to click on new right here so basically what we've done is we've taken this and we've created a new texture that's going to be applied to this object that texture is going to affect where the displacement is going to occur and so what we can do is we can come over here and click on the button for show texture and texture tab notice how that basically takes us to this tab right here and it's allowing us to adjust this texture003 and so you can apply different kinds of textures to this object so for example you can apply an image or movie which we'll talk about in a second so that could be like a displacement map or something like that but you can also use things like noise so let's say i was to come in here and select the option for cloud right here well when i select the option for cloud what that's going to do is that's creating a procedural texture right here so you can see the texture that's being created and you can adjust things like the size of that material well basically what that's doing is that's creating this grayscale image and it's displacing things more or less based on the darks and lights of your materials so you can adjust other settings in here as well to adjust how strong the transition is so for example i could adjust that contrast up well notice how when i adjust the contrast up what that's doing is that's making the darker areas darker the lighter areas lighter and that means that this is only being applied to my object in areas where the darks are or actually where the lights are i believe so you can use this in order to create interesting procedural um displacements inside your model so let's say we were to take this object right here and we're going to go ahead and we're going to add this modifier so we'll do the splice modifier we'll add this material and so you can use this in order to apply different kinds of noise to this object as a texture and notice i can adjust that up or down but one of the things you might be noticing right now is this really isn't giving us a result that corresponds with what this texture material looks like right and so the reason for that is actually because we don't have enough geometric detail inside of this object so if we look at this object right if we tab into edit mode we've got some geometric detail in here but not enough and so what it's trying to do is it's trying to apply this displacement in here but there's a limited number of vertices that it can use in order to do that so a lot of the time what you'll end up doing in a situation like this is you might come in here and you might add a subdivision surface modifier first you don't want to do a second you want to do it first so there's more data in here for this to use but we can turn up that subdivision we might put it on simple so it doesn't mess up our corners but notice how what that's doing is that's giving us more detail in here and so when we have more detail this can displace things more accurately inside a blender so notice how now we can use this in order to generate this really cool um this really cool texture based displacement inside of our model and so again in addition to like cranking up your subdivision you could also come in here and just add a little more detail so if i just tab in edit mode hit a and then i subdivide this one more time and then tab out of that notice how that detail is really going to give me the ability in here to create something really cool and so what this is doing right is this is creating that detail inside of a 3d space one thing to be aware of by the way when you're doing this is you want to make sure that um you're not creating too much geometry in here right because what this is doing is this is subdividing this and creating a whole lot of vertices and other things like that so if you get too heavy with it while you are going to get a smoother result what's going to start happening is computer's going to start slowing down because it's trying to do all the calculations in here to make these show up properly however what this does do is this gives us a really interesting opportunity and i'm going to toggle this off for right now but this gives us a really interesting opportunity to create displacement inside of the 3d space using things like material maps so let's say for example that i was to tab into edit mode and this is already this is already subdivided so we're good there but we're going to apply or we're going to add a displace modifier we're going to add a new texture but this time instead of using one of our noise textures we're going to use the image or movie and what i'm going to do is i'm going to go pull in a height map that i've downloaded from a texture website um i can't remember where i got this one you can get them from like texturehaven.com or anything like that but i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to add an image so i'm just going to click on open so i'm going to add an image i'm going to click on open and in this case this is actually something i created from polygon but really any height map would work i'm going to pull in a height map right here i'm going to open that image well notice what this does is this looks like a piece of brick inside of my scene right so basically the lights should be up and the darks should be down and so what this is doing is this is using that in order to create a brick texture on my surface however notice how the result not very good right now right so the reason for that is because again we don't have enough geometric detail in here so i'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier right here go ahead and drag this up and we can go ahead and bump that up a couple times and even then we don't quite have enough so i'm just going to tab in edit mode i'm just going to subdivide this again and now you can see how this is getting a lot closer but our strength is too strong right it's it's displacing everything way too much so what we want to do is we're going to bring the strength inside of our modifier settings down like this and so when we do that notice how we're able to create like this brick texture in here um or this actual 3d brick in here by displacing our geometry like this notice how if i up my subdivision again i'm going to put this on simple i'm going to up my subdivision notice how this gets even more detailed when we do that so we can use this in order to fake 3d in here without having to actually come in here and model all this detail ourselves now i will say this is a very expensive way of doing this from a processor standpoint so i wouldn't do this all over the place but you could use this in order to quickly generate this 3d geometry inside of the space so that's kind of an overview of the displace modifier leave a comment below let me know if you have any questions there's a lot of interesting stuff we could do with this in the future so i will link some other modifier tutorials on this page as well as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 81,301

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender displace, blender displacement, blender displace modifier, blender displacement modifier

Id: XBdNZIs1U8w

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2022