Use Image for displacing voxels or surface?

[ID Guy]

Hi,

Is there a tool in 3d coat that will let me use an image for displacing geometry? I thought maybe the Bas-relief would work, but it doesnt appear to be made for this scenario. For example I have a coin that I have an image of and would like to use that to create high resolution geometry of the coin details on the model. I suppose I could make a custom brush alpha, but I don't know how well the control and precision will be when I go to click and place those details. Any ideas?

[digman]

Here is one way. import your coin image as a material. Have the coin centered in the image and your image should not be close to the edges as the material will be tiled in the viewport.

This is a surface mode method

Use the LC InflateClay brush... set your detail under the tools options panel high enough to capture the coin's details. You can manually set it higher than 3.00. Also detail amount depends on your brush size as well. This will just take a few test to find out the best setting. LC has dynamic tessellation.

In the e-panel select the brush that is not effected by your tablet pen. Radius and depth will be as you set it in the upper tool menu.

Choose the default alpha that has no falloff. Also make sure there is no falloff in the top tool menu.

Increase the brush radius to just inclosed the coin.

left mouse click or use your pen. You might have to wait a bit if the detail is really high.

Just experiment with the above and hope this helps...

EDIT: Since I do not know your workflow, you can also use a material in Per-Pixel or Micro-Vertex mode in the paintroom to do the same thing for details in your normal map or displacement map except of course you will use different tools..

On the left in the picture is the surfure mode stamp using the InflateClay brush and I stamped the color from my image in the paintroom using polypainting (vertex painting).

[ID Guy]

Thanks digman. That helped for sure. For some reason the inflate clay brush would not displace the mesh with the material texture though even with all the setting checked that you mentioned. It simply extruded the hard alpha brush. When I tried with standard live clay brush or general brush it worked as you say though. Thanks again for the help.