STILL SILLY.

 The other week I made a snowman out of squiggly lines. I have been thinking what to pop him on. 

I started with a Plane mesh in Blender and divided it lots and lots of times.

I then toddled across to Photoshop and made myself a displacement image.

This is just what it looks like, a white background with black text on. It's then back into Blender.

This is what it does when used as a displacement map. This font although Cristmassy is too complex, I'll try a few different ones. The beauty of this is that the contrast can be keyframed by varying the contrast the letters are deeper or shallower.

Plenty to play with and polish up here, I'll try using a cloud texture to get bumpy snow and also mess about with the grid subdivisions and the pixels/inch of the text bit. 

I've not seen this done before but it must have been.

PS. This will be the last image as the effect is getting there now and I want there to be a bit of a surprise left.

I will try making the displacement map with white lettering on a black background, The text will then rise up and if I pop a 50% grey border on the letters it will soften the edge. That's it, I hope to get a video done for the week before Christmas.