DMesh Sample Displacement Map Animations

These samples are from previous pre-alpha versions of the software. This page is provided for historical purposes only, and does not fully reflect the current status of the project. The page will be revised with current examples as soon as possible.

DMesh Displacement Map Samples - Version 0.42 alpha

Sample Arm Displacement Maps

These maps are not ment to be anatomically correct, and are provided for illustration purposes only.

Note: These image maps contain approximately 175 levels of greyscale information. Although the .GIF format technically supports 255 levels of greyscale information, many display devices clip this to 6 bit or 64 levels. If you are viewing this site using an 8 or 16 bit display device, the additional greyscale levels will not be displayed and the image will contain banding and appear very coarse.

Arm Displacement Map 1

Arm Displacement Map 2

(Click to Enlarge)

These two displacement maps define the basic musulature of a humanoid arm with 'two stage morphology'. The first map shows the muscles 'at rest', while the second map displays the muscles in a 'stressed' position. (As this can be very difficult to envision from the greyscale images, a few small sample animations are provided below.)

The first image was created using OOM to describe the basic musculature layer, while the second image was created using the animation layer to provide time-based movement constraints to the individual muscles. The animation sequence was then exported as displacement maps.

(Only the first and last frames are shown, although this is sufficient for this example. See usage below.)

(Note: TIF or TGA versions of these maps are available if required. Please refer to the Contact Info page )

View of Arm A sample view of the completed arm created from these image maps.
Sample Animations:

MS .AVI versions:

AutoDesk .FLC versions:

Usage:
  1. Click on the displacement map thumbnail to view the larger displacement image-map and save to your local system. The larger versions have been converted to the .GIF format to maintain web browser compatability, so they may need to be converted to an image format supported by your rendering engine.
  2. The displacement image should be mapped onto a cylinder 6.5 units high with a radius of 0.01 or smaller. (0.00 is the preferred radius, but some 3D engines will choke on this.)
  3. The amount of displacement should range from 0.00 to 1.00, with a palette id of 0 giving a displacement of 0.00, and a palette id of 255 giving a displacement of 1.00. (Note: due to a slight bug in the current displacement map engine, this value should further be divided by 0.75, giving an actual displacement range of 0 to 1.33)
  4. The displacement maps have been created with the 'seam' at the back of the arm. Therefore, the left and right edges of the maps define the back of the arm, while the center of the map describes the bicep area.
  5. To create the 'muscle flexing' animations, a simple averaging between the two maps is sufficient for this example. (ie. TotalDisp = (dispImage1* (1-time) ) + (dispImage2 * time) ) Additional key frame maps would be required for more complex situations.
  6. Some sample source/psuedo code available as disp1.txt

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