Using Stress Map to control Displacement.

After seeing the amazing work Chris Jones did in Lightwave using tension maps, I decided to see how Blender’s stress mapping works.

The uploader keeps rejecting my Blend file, but the image below should explain most of it.
It’s pretty straight forward. You create a gradient texture, which must be above the displacement texture in the texture stack. Make sure that Stencil and RGB to Intensity are checked. In the Mapping Coordinates, select Stress.
(I checked the Color setting in the Influence panel so that the pink area would show where the compression stresses are at.)

For the wrinkle texture, you would ideally sculpt the wrinkles and bake that out as a displacement map, but I just painted a quick wrinkle map in Photoshop Elements. The cyclinder was UV unwrapped and the wrinkle texture applied to it. Rather than a Displacement Modifier, I used the Displacement in the texture Influence panel.


One thing I haven’t been able to figure out is how Chris used multiple displacement maps in the same area. For example, when the eyebrows move up, there are horizontal wrinkles on the forehead, but when the eyebrows are scrunched down and in, there are vertical wrinkles there. Not sure how that would be done in Blender. Is it the up and down motion of the eyebrow bones that trigger the change? He’s got some complicated node setup in Lightwave that I can’t understand.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about…
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNiuRnisK98

Steve S

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very impressive! :wink:
this could extend to bulges, tendons, fabrics… great work!

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Considering how many things it could be used for, there’s hardly anything written about the Stress Map feature.

Steve S

See if this works for the Blend file…

That’s very impressive stuff, Steve! You’re right, there’s huge potential for it. I’m sure someone out there could think of a way to implement multiple displacement maps. Awesome work so far, though!

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wow… I didn’t now that the interal has a stress map texture system!! Amazing. Would be nice to have it in cycles as well, but maybe it is possible to some how bake it and use it in cycles.

By the way, thanks for sharing, that’s a great thing to know! :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the comments. You can create some shadows in the creases by selecting the Color option in the Influence panel of the wrinkle map. Set the blend mode to Soft Light, and turn down the Color setting to about 0.3.


Steve S

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That’s so impressive.
I think he has driven the map influencce based on bones orientation of the eyebrow or something like this.
Or he may have separated bones to drive the influence.

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Great tool! Very useful and i’t working well! Thank you for taking time to build this possibility!

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did you guys see these?
imagine the potential.

@Steve_S: good looking … thanks :slight_smile:
Anyway, I download your blend to test, but I can’t see the effect.
Do I have to press anything or should it work since blend file is opened?
Thanks for help.

Did you hit Render? It doesn’t show up in the shaded preview mode.

Steve S

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From what I understand from an old YouTube video I saw on displacement maps the drivers &textures are set up to vertex groups so multiple bone rotations trigger different maps for that given group.

I don’t think internal does. This member created it as an add-on that can be used in cycles.