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I know how to achieve displacement in Blender, but lately I read Blender documentation and found this page: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/materials/displacement.html.

My question: Is there anything like "Displacement" node? If so, where is it? - cause there is no example or tutorial of using it beside this documentation page. If there is no such thing why it is described on official documentation pages?

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The Displacement node is an upcoming feature - this is an example of the documentation being ahead of the official Blender release.

You’ll note that in the example image from the documentation the Material Output Displacement socket is a Vector type (it’s blue). At all ‘current’ releases of Blender the Displacement socket is a Scalar value (grey) and would act as displacement along the surface normal.

The Displacement node effectively allows you to generate the Vector displacement from a Scalar value to effectively mimic the displacement available at 2.79 of Blender. The new Vector displacement will be an exciting new feature (for me, at least) and should hopefully be a point where the experimental ‘true’ displacement becomes standard supported functionality (rather than ‘experimental’ and subject to change - as it has here!).

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  • $\begingroup$ Hi Rich, thanks for the answer. But still, I think it is confusing for new comers and beginners. $\endgroup$ – Jazzu Jul 4 '18 at 8:55
  • $\begingroup$ @Jazzu I completely agree - it only makes sense if you know some background about the issues and functionality and the documentation could benefit from a sidenode or clarification that this relates to future functionality. Longer term it should sort itself out when the development catches up. It’s a rare situation where the documentation is ahead of the functionality - in most computing projects it’s normally the other way around and documentation is an afterthought! $\endgroup$ – Rich Sedman Jul 4 '18 at 9:18
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The Displacement node is added after 2.79b and is available in the experimental builds of Blender. Blender institute might release a 2.79c version of Blender in a soon future which will have the Displacement node as well. You can download the experimental builds here.

enter image description here

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