How to Add Displacement

Displacement mapping creates additional topography to your objects without actually having to model anything. It is similar to bump mapping, but it actually adds geometry, instead of mimicking it. See our Displacement Mapping article for a more detailed explanation.

This tutorial shows you the steps for adding displacement to scene objects.

Download the scene to follow along

This scene is made with V-Ray 7 hotfix 2, on Blender 4.3.

1 Initial Setup

1. Select the geometry you want to displace. In this case, select Racket_Rubber_01.
2. Expand the Editor below the viewport. Set it to the V-Ray Node Editor. Set the Node Tree to Object. 
3. Click on the Use V-Ray Object Nodes button at the top of the V-Ray Node Editor. Since this is a preset scene, the Racket_Rubber_01 geometry has this option already enabled, so you can see in the video this button shown on a different geometry.
4. The V-Ray Object Output node appears in the node editor.

2 Add Displacement

To add any node to the Node Editor, you need to open the Add menu. The shortcut is to use Shift + A, or you can find it in the toolbar at the top of the Editor. In the Add menu, search for V-Ray Displacement.

Connect the V-Ray Displacement node to the Displacement input of the V-Ray Object Output node.

3 Add a Displacement Bitmap

In the Assets folder of the downloadable scene file, you can find Paddle_Displacement.exr. This will be the displacement map we will use for this tutorial.

In the V-Ray Node Editor, click Shift + A, or open the Add menu from the toolbar. Search for the V-Ray Bitmap node. Click the Open button and find the Paddle_Displacement.exr texture in your system. Select the texture and click Open Image.

Connect the Color output of the V-Ray Bitmap to the Texture input of the V-Ray Displacement node.

4 Bitmap Properties

Open the Node menu on the right side of the Node Editor. Select the V-Ray Bitmap node to view its properties there. 

The Filter Blur property optimizes the render time by blurring the map slightly. In this scene, we are emphasizing quality, so we reduce the value to 0.100.

Our displacement map is in an .exr format, which is a 16-bit image format. Thus, we need to set the Transfer Function to Linear and the Color Space to Raw. 

Leave the rest of the properties as they are.

If we render the scene now, we can see that the displacement is applied, but it is too strong. We need to reduce it.

When adjusting displacement, keep in mind the size of the scene. This scene was made with small dimensions, so we need to reduce the displacement effect quite a bit. You can view each object's dimensions in the Item menu on the right side of the viewport.

5 Displacement Properties

Select the Displacement node and open the Node menu. Set these properties:

• Set the Mode to 2D. This is the needed mode when using a Bitmap to define displacement.
• Set the Displacement Amount to 0.001. This is due to the small size of the scene.
• Set the Resolution to 1024, which is the resolution of the .exr image file. When using Bitmaps to determine displacement, it is good to match the Resolution to the actual resolution of the image file.

Leave all other parameters as they are.

We can render the scene now. You can see that the displacement renders properly, it is not too strong, and it looks like it belongs. What happens here is that the dots on the rubber are created at render time as separate geometry.

We can now copy and paste our already-made displacement setup onto the other ping-pong racket in the scene.

6 Copy Displacement to Other Geometry

You can copy and paste any node setup onto a different object, shader, or world setup. Click and drag your mouse around the nodes to select them, along with their connections. You can right-click and select Copy or use the shortcut CTRL + C. 

Then, go to the Racket_Rubber_02 geometry and in its Object Node Tree, right-click and select Paste, or use the shortcut CTRL + V.

This is an easy way to apply the same effect to multiple geometries in the same scene.

Here is how the final render looks. Apply this workflow to your scenes to add displacement to one or multiple geometries.