Working with displacement mapping

- Whilst bump mapping is a material effect…that can work well in many instances,…creating as it does the illusion…of depth in an object without adding…anything to our overall render times,…there will be occasions where the fact…that this is render engine trick…becomes a little too obvious for the success of a shot.…On such occasions, especially where the believability…of a material or object is integral…to the success of the project,…we may want to swap bump mapping for displacement mapping.…One extremely nice feature that mental ray…shares in common with many ray trace…render engines available for Maya,…is its ability to generate render time displacement…based on grayscale inputs.…

This means that rather than having to process…extremely dense meshes in the viewport whilst we work,…we can postpone all of the heavy mesh subdivision…required for good displacement…until we actually hit the render button.…To make a start at creating our displacement effect,…let's take an initial render of our scene,…so as to have something against which…