Displace geometry with B/W source?

Hi,

I’d like to use a black/white image (e.g Depth feed from a kinect) to displace the points of another piece of geometry (i.e: a flat plane).

The basic idea is so that when people walk pass the camera, a flat plane (with a texture applied) will be displaced in Z, before returning back to “flat”. It would be great if this also had an inertia or “springy-ness” to it. (If even possible?)

I’ve been working through all of MR tutorials slowly, but can’t find anything like this.

Any tips greatly appreciated!

Thx!

Hi imrsvhk,

MR here. I think what you’re after can be found here:

matthewragan.com/2014/04/27/ins … hdesigner/

or here:

matthewragan.com/make-some-nois … hdesigner/

In the rutt etra example you can leave your mesh whole (not broken into rows), you’ll just need to recalculate your normals after converting back to a SOP.

You can achieve a very similar result with a vertex shader, you’ll just need to make sure you do your normal recalculation in your vertex stage.

1 Like

Hi Matthew,

Thanks for sharing those (and for all the other knowledge you share to all!)

I tried those, although not exactly what I’m trying to achieve. I found one of your other shared .toes which has a GLSL shader and slightly modified that. It’s closer to what I’m trying to achieve.

The displacement effect is working, but I wonder, is it possible to add a texture to the plane separately? I’m very new to GLSL.

Any tips as to how I might go about this?

Best,
Displacer-01.toe (8.46 KB)

If I understand correctly, you’re looking to use one texture for displacement, and a different one for the color map. Is that correct?

The tuts to work through for this would be from the make-some-noise workshop we held in SF:
matthewragan.com/make-some-nois … hdesigner/

That will cover the basics of vertex displacement and should get you started.

Thanks for the quick response.

Yeah, that’s what I am trying to achieve.

Ok, I’m already on part 2 or 13. Hopefully by the end I’ll be able to grasp.

Thanks again!