Displacement

Unlike bump mapping, which is a shading effect and does not create actual geometry, displacement mapping correctly generates new geometry from a base mesh and specified displacement map, by displacing the mesh vertices along their normals according to the displacement map.

This ensures that object silhouettes are correctly rendered, and is recommended for large displacements where bump mapping would look unrealistic; even mountain ranges can be efficiently created with this technique.

A constant setting displaces the entire mesh evenly by the defined amount. A texture map displaces the vertices based on values in a grey-scale image.

See the Texture Maps section for information on texture attributes.

An example material a grating texture displacement map.

Materials which have a displacement attribute:
Diffuse
Phong
Specular
Oren-Nayar
Glossy Transparent
Diffuse Transmitter