You need to render a rock surface and you just have a diffuse map. How to convert it in a useful displacement map?

Most of times you open the texture in photoshop and work it in order to get your displacement map. But often we just get really rought surfaces. How to improve it?

In this cases a really useful tool in Photoshop is Cutout filter:

Cutout reduce the nuances present in the image, thus solving most of the problems!

The classic steps to create a displacement map is:

• Transform it in black and white texture
• Contrast the image
• Save and apply it in the displacement channel

Ok guys, today I want to suggest one step more:

Apply the cutout filter (to reduce the color variations):

Look at the difference in the image below:

If you want to refine the displacement map you can use Gaussian blur filter. The displacement will be more soft!

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial!