This is something that I avoid talking about. As you read through this, don't be surprised if I sound a bit angry.
Sneak Peak 2
Even for a sneak peak, I'm not showing quite as much as I want to.
As we saw way back in the beginning, you can pick a colour from a reference cube and know it's direction when you hit Displace. The opposite is also true. That is, you can start with a colour, then Select > Colour Range in the reference cube to see where that colour with grab from. This is good.
Now, there are a lot of tutorials out there about wrapping a texture to a face or something. The majority of those tutorials are just flat out wrong. Yes, they are wrong.
One method to show that they are wrong involves the above Colour Range trick. Unfortunately, I don't have the strength right now to run you folks through it. If you are smart enough, and I'm sure you are, you'll figure it out.
Another method to show that they are wrong is Power Distort. Luckily, I just happen to have a face to illustrate this.
Upper-Left
This is the face that I chose. If you are using one of those other tutorials, chances are you would be recycling the colour information in the photo. Right? Thought so.
Upper-Right
Oh, man. I stitched together eleven funky quads to get a partial D-Map. It's not the whole face, but it's enough to get my point across. It is a lot of work, but the end result is far superior to recycling colour values from the photo.
Lower-Left
This is the Red channel of the partial D-Map.
Lower-Right
This is the Green channel of the partial D-Map.
I'm sure you can see how both of those channels are a far cry from the values in the photo.
I have tried this D-Map and it works very well. Although, I haven't gotten an example that I'm entirely happy with. That is, I have yet to find a texture or something that looks decent when wrapped. I tried grids and a few other things, and they do wrap well, but they don't look that great for one reason or another.
While most of the time recycling colour information is bad, there are times when it works. A certain someone did a fine job of this. When I get to the official tutorial, I'll get into this.
That's about it from me.
play.fiddle.learn