Hi @Gijs, thanks for making these tests. I can say for sure that any of these tricks using multiply, addition, clamping etc. will not work out as they are all image based. I’ve tried to explain that here, here, here and here.
If you look close to your example you’ll spot that it does not start the displacement at zero. This is because you cannot enter the proper gray value to add to, it is not 50% gray, you would need to enter 127.5 to get there.
Since i’ve been trying to explain this for a long time, i’m wondering why this is such a big deal ? Math wise it should be easy to multiply the entered displacement distance and create a vector starting from the current mesh vertex with the distance as length. Then just add this vector to the vertex to get the displaced vertex.
Ideally i would like to control the min (black) and max (white) values for a displacement numerically. I often get the displacement texture with requests like: “The total depth for the structure would be 1.5mm but you can get in 0.25mm and then deform 1.25mm outward”.
thanks,
c.