Week 5 Class Practical: Part 5 - Hypershade & Displacement Mapping

The final part of this weeks practical shows what the hypershade window is, how to use it and the next step up from bump mapping; displacement mapping. To begin with, hypershade is a material explorer for your scene located at the top of the screen as a small spherical icon.

Clicking this icon will take you into the hypershade window with a list of any materials and textures you have worked with in this scene, amongst other things. Clicking on one of these will give you a preview of it on the spherical shape in the top right. You can also adjust many of the parameters of those materials in the property editor located beneath the preview sphere.

Holding right click on an object and selecting "Graph Network" will also show you all of the various objects this material has been applied to on your scene. This is very useful for keeping track of which materials have been applied where in the scene.

Finally in this practical I have learned about the use of displacement mapping. When using a bump map on an object the texture will give the illusion of depth using light and shadow, sometimes however you need the actual geometry to have depth to make a more realistic model. Displacement mapping allows you to add this depth to the geometry at render at the cost of a longer render time but still keeping the poly count low on your models. This type of mapping is applied in much the same way as bump mapping, by selecting an object and applying a texture to it. In this example I have made a sphere and applied the "blinn" texture to it. Once added I accessed the material panel in the attributes editor and clicked a small box with a outwards facing arrow to take me to the "Shading Group Attributes" parameters, as shown below.

Once in this menu I clicked the small chequered box next to the "Displacement Mat." parameter in order to load a displacement texture. In this particular example I chose the "Cloth" procedural texture map with extreme parameters to apply to this shape, however bitmap textures will also work for this. After rendering the scene the effect on the sphere was not only the effective "appearance" of depth, but an actual change in the geometry as seen below.