34 MOONRAKER’S GRAHAM STOTT ON DISPLACE3D

USE DISPLACE3D FOR PROJECTED SURFACES AND PARTICLE SYSTEMS

Displace3d is very handy for creating complicated geometry catchers for projected surfaces, but it’s also interesting to use with animated heightmaps for meshes in particle systems.

i. Create a particle system that emits from a sphere along a vector. Set the particle style to any of the circular ngons and reduce the size to the sub pixel level, check supersampling on and set the composition render quality to HIQ.

ii. Next, create a shape to disrupt the flow of the particles (for now use a simple plane) and up the polygon count to a higher number than the default – try 100 to begin with. After the shape node, plug in a Displace3d node and then plug a fast noise into the displacement input. Create a Merge3d and plug it all in. Add a transform node after the Displace3d and reposition the plane so that its displaced surface is intersecting the flow of the particles.

iii. Now let’s use the pavoid node to generate some interactions between the particles and the displaced plane. Under the region tab select ‘Mesh’, then connect the displaced shape.

iv. The trick now is to experiment with different distance and strength settings inside the pavoid node against different displacement settings of the fastnoise. The scene should be relatively quick to preview and render time will be negligible, so try setting different seethe rates in the noise, to animate the displacements that are interacting with the particles.

Of course you aren’t restricted to connecting the displaced meshes to pavoid, animated displaced meshes can be used as emitters as well as collision objects – so get experimenting! Graham Stott, Moonraker VFX