Hi Wooly, yeah like Martin mentions above a "displacement" map is more what you want for actually altering geometry rather than just a visual only effect like bump mapping.

Then different programs use some different kinds of terminology for generating the displacement as a stand alone model rather than just generating geometry at render time alone. Sometimes it's called "freezing" the model, and sometimes it may be a special tool - I think in Rhino it's called ExtractRenderMesh (or possibly "ApplyDisplacement"), although I'm not 100% certain - you should probably ask on the Rhino discussion list if you can't find it.


> how would I go about doing this in Moi?

MoI does not have any function in it currently for modifying an object by applying a bitmap texture onto it - typically that kind of texturing is done to polygon mesh objects and MoI specializes in NURBS surface editing and not polygon mesh editing.

MoI does have a command called "Flow" which does allow you to apply geometry onto a target surface kind of similar to texture mapping, but it's not a bitmap being applied, it's other objects being applied. See here for some more info and examples on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4856.2

There's also a free program called ZSurf which can build a "heightfield" NURBS surface based off of a bitmap, that may possibly be of use:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3825.2

But if you want something that works exactly like displacement mapping by applying bitmap textures, you probably want to be looking at using some kind of polygon mesh and rendering oriented program for producing that specific effect instead of doing that directly inside of MoI, since MoI is not itself focused on editing polygon mesh geometry.

- Michael