Blender Displacement Modifier: Incorrect Distribution Issue and the Solution
Problem: You’ve downloaded some textures and intend to use a displacement modifier to create physical distortions on your mesh. In other words, you won’t be utilizing the ‘Displacement’ input of the ‘Material Output’ node. Within the texture mapping node, you scale your albedo, roughness, normal, and other textures to your preference. However, there’s an issue: the displacement distribution applied by the displacement modifier is completely incorrect.
Today, we’ll delve into why the displacement modifier miscalculates the distribution in your displacement texture, and how to address this problem.
Let’s Begin
Here, I have a plain subdivided plane. After subdividing it, I re-unwrapped it and applied all transforms. On the right side of the screen, as you can see, there is an additional subdivision modifier to increase polycount so we would have a more eye-catching displacement distribution over the mesh. The displacement modifier is using the UV map as its coordinate method. So far, a very simple setup, and everything works as expected.
Now let’s say, I think the texture I applied to my mesh is too big, so I want to scale it. What do we do in this case?
We go to the ‘Shader Editor’ and adjust the scale of our texture through the mapping node. In this case, I am changing my value from the default 1 to 2.5. I also increased the displacement strength a bit to better demonstrate what’s happening here.
As depicted in the screenshot above, the displacement information within my displacement texture appears to be improperly distributed. Why is this the case?
What’s the fix?
I went and set all my mapping node scale values back to their default of 1. Now what we can do is, we can switch to the ‘UV Editor’ window and scale up or down our actual UV maps. Since we’re editing our UVs directly here, the displacement modifier will take the changes into account and act accordingly.
Scaling up my texture in the ‘UV Editor’ panel.
And as expected, now our displacement distribution is done correctly.
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