Quote from: gregtee on October 30, 2013, 04:56:52 PM
Does the Displacement attribute actually displace or is it a bump? I can't tell at this point.
Certain "displaceable objects" are always rendered with displacement. These are the Disc, Lake, Plane, Planet and Sphere.
All other object types (TGO, OBJ, LWO, Card, Grass Clump, Rock) are "non-displaceable". The ray tracer cannot render displacement on these objects, but the micropolygon rasteriser can. The Ray Trace Objects setting on the render node controls which render engine is used. If Ray Trace Objects is ON (the default), there will be no displacement, and displacement is automatically rendered as a bump map. If Ray Trace Objects is OFF, the micropolygon rasteriser will render the visible surface, so displacement will be visible on the surface, but
shadows and reflections are always rendered with the ray tracer, so shadows will not be displaced and reflections will be rendered with bump mapping, not displacement.It's usually better to render with Ray Trace Objects ON, even though it doesn't render displacement on the non-displaceable types, because RTO renders higher quality images and renders them faster.
Adding proper displacement to the ray tracer for all object types is one of our future goals. We also plan to allow per-object control over which render engine is used.
Matt
