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A Displacement modifier is doing a great job making a mesh look a realistic object, but there are certain spots, such as a dozen or so vertices at one corner of the mesh, where I don't want any displacement effect. The displacment is making a mess of things in those spots.

I don't want to undo my brilliant sculpting work there and re-do it after applying the modifier, or to fix the mess afterward. In fact, I don't want to apply the modifier. Never mind my particular reason, since other Blender modelers may have the same question and want to animate, adjust the Displacment settings later, copy the object but have different ripples in the objects (using global coords), or whatever.

What would be nice is a way to modulate the "strength" setting with a grayscale image or painting in a UV map, but I'm not seeing how to do that. I'm one of: unlucky at Google today, stupid, or ignorant of some non-obvious feature in Blender. Maybe there's a nodes editor way to build a processing pipeline for modifier parameters?

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  • $\begingroup$ As for your second question, I would suggest splitting it into a second question. Stack Exchange works best where there is one question per post. $\endgroup$ – A Wild RolandiXor Jul 16 '13 at 15:37
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You can achieve this by applying your displace modifier to a vertex group.

Displace modifier

Just ensure that the vertices you don't want it applied to are not a part of your vertex group.

Example: enter image description here

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Ah, vertex groups - one of many important features I haven't gotten around to using much. Perfect solution to the problem. $\endgroup$ – DarenW Jul 16 '13 at 7:32
  • $\begingroup$ @DarenW glad to help :) Don't forget if (and only if!) this answer answered your question, to mark it as answered by clicking the tick next to the answer. $\endgroup$ – A Wild RolandiXor Jul 16 '13 at 15:35
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The Texture and/or Vertex Group settings of the Displace modifier controls the influence.

It seems you are already using a texture and want to mask out areas of that. Doing this with texture nodes is currently not possible and has been on the development todo list for a while:

Texture nodes disabled for displacement now, conflict in using it with render (needs owner for stack).

Remaining options:

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As for modulating the strength value, the way to control individual values in blender is either through keyframes or drivers.

By right-clicking on the value you can 'Insert Keyframe' or 'Add Driver'

The blender wiki has a short tutorial that can get you started.

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    $\begingroup$ This doesn't seem to answer the question, which was about altering the effects on different parts of mesh, not on different parts of animation. $\endgroup$ – hjaarnio Jul 16 '13 at 11:51
  • $\begingroup$ The main question involves preventing the displacement modifier from altering some vertices which RolandiXor answered. In the last paragraph DarenW asks for a way to modulate the strength of the modifier to which I added the keyframe and driver options. $\endgroup$ – sambler Jul 16 '13 at 13:07
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    $\begingroup$ The strength value is applied uniformly across the displacement. For modulating, you'd want to use the Wave modifier, an animated texture, animated texture coordinates or animated vertex weight. $\endgroup$ – Aldrik Jul 16 '13 at 14:11

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