Minor Project: Displacement Experiments 001-012

Today I wanted to experiment more with the displacement material channel in Maya (in this case Arnold) because I found some of my previous tests using it produced interesting results. I think this overall can be very helpful with my project because I can create very unique shapes just by messing around with some settings and I can also animate the different channels if I want to. After some discussions today, I am planning on brainstorming some ideas of more 'abstract' ways to achieve what I want. Rather than always going for the literal representation of what I'm talking about in my poem I'm going to try to focus on the feelings I want the viewer to feel instead. I feel that displacement can be helpful in this regard to create unique, abstract digital sculptures for my film.

In this test I applied a 'brushed metal' preset onto the sphere and plugged in the 'bulge' 2D texture into the displacement material channel. I then played around with the subdivision/displacement attribute settings, the settings on the 'bulge' texture, and its UV coordinates. Here are some of the results for that particular test. I find them all interesting but I'm most drawn to 006 and 011.