HI! what’s the best approach to create this texture? any help would be greatly appreciated…
Get a 16-bit high-resolution greyscale version of your texture. Use displacement for rendering. Use heightfield for a polygon mesh.
That image appears to be shadowed, rather than a heightfield, meaning the shading does not correspond to the actual height at a specific location.
That’s the key. As @cdordoni writes, you can’t use an image with shadows. You need pure “up/down” information. Here, white means “up”. See the terracotta vase ornament below (8-bit displacement map, 16-bit is preferred for rendering). Use Heightmap and drag a square plane (the map is a square PNG image) with 200 x 200 samples and 5 mm height and the Mesh setting. Then use Smooth with a factor of 0.2 and 40 steps. This gives you a mesh as shown below.
wow! nice I see its a little difcult to me as is the first time Im doing this but I’ll keep trying..
I see good point cdordoni, I’ll try again thanks!
Whether for mesh generation or rendering with displacement, you must use 16-bit (or 8-bit) greyscale texture maps with pure height/depth - up/down - white/black information.
Using a normal highlight/shadow image will never look real, even when it is a perfect “2D” image taken from above. See the one below, where although not “on the top” striations or grains of sand are almost pure white, which is why this won’t work at all, whether for mesh generation nor rendering, whereas the agitated swimming pool texture map will work.
