real displacement textures
Can these texture packs improve your images?
Creating believable natural surfaces in 3D can be tricky. Sand, soil, mud and rock consist of millions of tiny particles, bits of detritus and imperfections, and are nigh-on impossible to model using traditional techniques.
Fortunately the latest highdefinition scanning systems are capable of producing texture and displacement maps that make the job easy. Real Displacement Textures is a small operation in Austria that’s been offering texture packs for a while, but it recently overhauled its webshop and added a raft of new products – available to buy as packs for between 119 and 359 (£104£314) depending if you’re an indie setup or a studio buying a site license. Individual sets can be purchased for around 8, and even as low as 3.
The store has a wide range of textures available, from pebble-strewn beaches to tyrechewed mud and leafy forest floors, but new elements such as brick walls, cobblestones and wooden panels have recently been added. There’s a great selection and, of course, once your collection starts to grow you can mix and match them to create an endless array of different surfaces. Throw in some props, like vegetation or a few random rocks, plus the proper lighting, and your scene goes from believable to photoreal in a few clicks.
Each texture set includes AO, bump, colour, depth, gloss, hi-gloss, normal and roughness texture maps in both 4K and 8K resolutions (with a few exceptions, such as the earlier sets).
Work With c4d
The latest sets are accompanied by scene files for Cinema 4D, with setups for the Advanced Renderer, Octane and V-ray – although they’ll work in any DCC app that supports displacements and game engines using the bump, normal and AO maps. RDT textures work brilliantly with Octane, with its lightningfast displacement and realistic daylight system – but even with C4D’S standard renderer they resolve really quickly and look equally realistic.
All textures are tiled, so it’s easy to cover large areas and it doesn’t take much work to avoid the repeating pattern look with layered materials or multiple meshes. When using Cinema 4D’s Standard render, for example, it’s easy enough to mix materials with selection sets, while in Octane, you can just have intersecting planes and let the displacement reveal one surface through the other.
The end results speak for themselves, but if you’re not convinced there are a couple of free ones for you to try – we recommend the Gravel 01 and Muddy Forest Floor to see what they can do. Be warned though, these things are like Pokémon: once you’ve grabbed up a few you’ll want to get ’em all!