Displacement Scanner

[robcat2075]

Here's something I've been wondering about for 20 years... Could i use A:M to scan a complex model to make a displacement map to put on a simple model and give it the shape of the complex model?

In this test case I used a surface constraint to measure the difference in radius between the left shape and the right one.

With some text editing and spreadsheet jiggling I made a bitmap out of that data and applied that to the simple shape on the right.

The "scan" was very lo res, just 30 pixels around the perimeter, and it has a glitch in it, but the basic concept worked. If I could streamline and automate the workflow a bit, the scans could be very high res and work in all dimensions

 

 

[Wildsided]

Looks promising Robert, hope you can smooth out the issues.

[Fuchur]

Are you using an EXR there?

 

Best regards

*Fuchur*

[robcat2075]

Are you using an EXR there?

 

Best regards

*Fuchur*

 

That was a TGA.

 

It was easy to make an 8-bit RAW image out of the numbers then resave that as TGA.

[Fuchur]

Especially for displaysmentmaps I like EXR (with 32bit per channel) very much, because there are just "more" color steps inbetween which makes it less "stepy".
I am not sure about the glitch... maybe it would be worth a try to use a transparency gradient at the start and end of the image?

Best regards

*Fuchur*

[Rodney]

In this test case I used a surface constraint to measure the difference in radius between the left shape and the right one.

 

With some text editing and spreadsheet jiggling I made a bitmap out of that data and applied that to the simple shape on the right.

 

The "scan" was very lo res, just 30 pixels around the perimeter, and it has a glitch in it, but the basic concept worked. If I could streamline and automate the workflow a bit, the scans could be very high res and work in all dimensions

 

 

Very intriguing.

Would love to hear more about your 'scanning' technique.

[robcat2075]

 

Very intriguing.

Would love to hear more about your 'scanning' technique.

 

 

 

Here is an overhead view of one lap around the object.

 

A small bone in the center is animated to point outward and rotate 360°

 

The large bone has surface constraint on it, so it sticks to the mesh wherever the center bone is pointing.

 

It is also constrained to Aim at and Scale to Reach the center bone.

 

 

 

 

 

If I Bake that action, the scaling of the long bone gets keyframed into the Chor.

 

Only the Z scale is needed. I can strip that out in a spread sheetand convert that data into single byte values.

 

That string of single bytes is pasted into a .TXT file, then saved and renamed to be a .RAW file which I can load into Phtoshop and resave as a TGA.

[Rodney]

Very interesting. Thanks for the deeper look.

You've given us a lot to think about.