Carve Alpha Channel from Plane I have a plane created from the "Import Image as Plane" plugin in blender. The image has an alpha channel that when imported displays as part of the plane, but transparent. What is the best way to carve the transparent portion of the object out, so the object is really just created in the form of the non-alpha portion of the original image.

I have found that I can use another cube mesh, line it up to the area I want to carve, and use a boolean object modifier to carve out the area that the two intersect. This works to an extent but I was hoping there was a more precise / quicker way to accomplish this. My concern about doing it this way is I have to size the cube manually and line it up with the mesh I want to carve from which leaves room for error.

The files I am trying this with now can be found here, including the PNG, a blend file, as well as some screenshots of what I am trying to accomplish.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B01XcbC87xlcLUVKa2x4VnJaQk0

To get that blend file I:


Imported Image as Plane, checking off to use Alpha
Set the shading of the plane to "Textured Solid"
Extruded the plane


I am extremely new to this, so if what I am asking is just not something that is done please let me know.
You could make 2 planes. One with a displace texture and subsurf modifiers applied.



On the other plane add subsurf and a boolean modifiers to receive the displace mesh as a hole cutter.



Boolean modifier will need a large amount of subsurf to get clean holes, but you could use a decimate modifier and smooth modifier to relax the mesh and reduce the vertices count.





Here I have also added a solidify modifier to make the plane thick.