Displacement Mapping with Blender By Anthony C. D'Agostino

Displacing the Mesh

So now we have a planar-displaced mesh and we can easily turn it into a spherical, cylindrical, or toroidal shape.  Just make sure the planar mesh is selected, press tab to leave editmode, and then run one of these scripts to get the desired shape:
displace_cyl.py, displace_sph.py, or displace_tor.py.

Note that the scripts overwrite the original mesh!  You may want to work on a copy in case you need to make changes or if you want to try one of the other scripts.