Hi Michael, many times rendering programs which use displacement texture maps can generate a "frozen" version of the object with the subdivided and displaced polygon geometry in it.

Also there's a class of sculpting applications that are primarily based on modifying mesh objects by applying displacement brush strokes on them, some examples are ZBrush, 3D-Coat, Sculptris, or Mudbox.

Maybe if you could give some more details of the kind of result you're looking for it would help to give some better information...


You might be interested in ZSurf which is a utility program that can take in a bitmap image, and generate a displaced surface that's based on it. It generates a surface that can be read back into MoI rather than generating a polygon mesh object like the other methods do. Some info on ZSurf here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=602.7
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2799.8
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2640.1

- Michael