Displacer Object

Example

Wouldn't it be nice if you could use displacement effects (see Displacement Mapping) using a deformation object so that they would be directly visible in the viewport?

Have you ever been annoyed that it took endless trial and error to find out where the displacement extends to in order to align other objects with it? The Displacer object does exactly that: it shows you the displacement via object deformation in the editor and is not only evaluated or visible at render time.

It works as a deformer object and must therefore be grouped as a child to the object to be deformed (or be located at the same hierarchy level under a common parent-object). Make sure that the object to be displaced is sufficiently subdivided.

Note:In certain constellations - assuming you have an object deformed by the Displacer object, which you use to place clones on the deformed object using a Cloner object - you should arrange the deformed object in front of the Cloner object in the Object Manager. Otherwise, the editor display may provide incorrect results (arrangement of the clones on the undeformed object). This only affects the editor display, everything works perfectly when rendering.

NoteThe Displacer object can also act on splines: Here, a Noise Shader in the Displacer object acts on a Circle spline (which itself is grouped under a Sweep object). This is cloned linearly by a Cloner object and a Step Effector is also used for scaling/rotation):

Note 3:Users of Sub Polygon Displacement also benefit from this. Although only the regular displacement is displayed, which is totally dependent on the objects subdivision, its dimensions correspond approximately to those of the later full-resolution rendering, unless you are using objects with only 8 points.

Of course, the Displacer object also works with all other MoGraph objects. Here, for example, a Ring was deformed using a Displacer object and a Noise Shader and then a Sphere was cloned using the Cloner object in Object mode.

For example, if you animate this Ring in its position and assign world coordinates (Space: World) to the Noise, you can imagine that spectacular morphing blobby effects will occur.