Displacement Mapping with Blender By Anthony C. D'Agostino

Spherical Example

So now that the basics are out of the way, let's go through some real examples.  Here we will use spherical mapping to create a volley ball.  Create your input mesh as described in Step 3.  You should already have your material and texture added (Step 5).  All you need now is to load the input image of an unwrapped volley ball as shown in Figure 2.  Finally, run the displace_sph.py script.

You will notice that the grooves on the surface of the ball are too deep even though we clicked on the 'Noise' button only once.  Fortunately, this can be fixed very easily.  Select all vertices in edit mode, press the 'To Sphere' button, and enter a percentage value of 60%.  Leave editmode and press the 'Set Smooth' button.  Now the grooves looks more like those found on a regulation size volley ball. The results should look similar to the image in Figure 3.
 
 

Figure 2                                         Figure 3