This plugin adds displacement map support to AC3D. Displacement mapping is a technique that deforms the current geometry, displacing the vertices in accordance with elevation values stored in a texture map. This technique is useful for “painting on” details onto a very high resolution mesh.

Displacement maps can be painted with 2D art tools such as Corel, Photoshop or Gimp; or, they can be exported from 3D sculpting programs such as ZBrush or Mudbox. The AC3D displacement map plugin supports 8-bit grayscale and 16-bit red-green (POV-Ray format) displacement maps.

If you are new to displacement mapping, this tutorial explains the process in more detail.

Download the plugin. (Requires Windows XP, AC3D 6.2 or above.)

The tiny little 320×240 render of the plasma for the POV-Ray tutorial was a bit hard to see, so I did a render in 1920 x 1080 resolution for those of you interested in seeing the details. It’s still a bit compressed, but the image is a lot clearer. You’ll find it here: download the video.

Enjoy!

POV-Ray has some very powerful commands for rendering realistic plasmas and explosions, but not very many people know how to use them well. This tutorial will show you how.

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