I can't believe it took me so long to figure this out but there you go.

Ages back, I asked if anyone had a shader which would allow me to render a 3D object in such a way that the render would be useful as a displacement map.  Imagine Victoria's face displaced out of a flat plane, for example.

Anyhow, several helpful people replied but all the ideas involved a lot of messing around and the results were less than ideal.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago...

I suddenly remembered Poser is an animation package, too.  Armed with this knowledge, I did the following:

Loaded Victoria 3 and made all body parts except for head invisible.

Made Diffuse and Specular black, made Ambient white with a value of 1.00 on all head parts, except for eyelashes and eyebrows, which were made transparent.  I also animated the Ambient colour to cycle down to almost black (15, 15, 15).

Loaded the One Sided Square, placed it in front of V3's head and scaled it up so the whole head was covered.  Set the square's Diffuse and Specular to black.

Deleted all lights.

Created 128 animation frames and moved the One Sided Square negative Z so that by the last frame, half of V3's head was showing.

Render as separate images.

The result was 128 frames, each one showing a little more of V3's head whilst becoming progressively darker.

Loaded the output into Photoshop and compiled all the layers into one document.

Deleted the black areas from each frame and flattened all the layers.

I now have a reasonable displacement map of V3's head.  I'll post a pic of the rendered result later.

I still can't believe it took me so long to figure it out, though.

 

Coppula eam se non posit acceptera jocularum.

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