I remember trying to do this with force displacement and didn't get the results I wanted, and Matt told me about the mesh displacer, but I didn't have access to that on freeware at the time. I long forgot but it just dawned on me this morning, so I did a quick test and thought I'd share for other users.
They don't look to bad, unfortunately I couldn't get any surface detail to show through with default or ray traced, oh well. Force Displacement you'll get broken normals and tears unfortunately (so I mocked it with some texture noise). But based on tiny sphere object, not bad.
Not bad indeed. Thanks for the share.
Looks good.
Cool stuff.
This setup needs at least Terragen 4.5.41 to recalculate the object normals after the mesh displacer. In earlier versions the shading will look wrong.
Quote from: WAS on October 11, 2020, 03:59:24 PMunfortunately I couldn't get any surface detail to show through with default or ray traced, oh well
If the spheres are low-poly then that limits how much detail you get from the mesh displacer. With high poly objects you should be able to get high detail mesh displacement.
Fantastic! Thanks Jordan.
Quote from: Matt on October 12, 2020, 10:00:35 PMCool stuff.
This setup needs at least Terragen 4.5.41 to recalculate the object normals after the mesh displacer. In earlier versions the shading will look wrong.
Quote from: WAS on October 11, 2020, 03:59:24 PMunfortunately I couldn't get any surface detail to show through with default or ray traced, oh well
If the spheres are low-poly then that limits how much detail you get from the mesh displacer. With high poly objects you should be able to get high detail mesh displacement.
Yeah I just remembered you telling me low poly objects work best with surface detail displacement like with the surface shader so that's where these low poly spheres come from. The mesh displaced is low detail, very smooth, buy that honestly helps to a degree getting shapes in without too much blowout with settings.
But with this setup I couldn't get any surface detail to work at all. Just doesn't do anything it seems.
Thanks, Jordan. Will be looking at this!
You're welcome. As Matt mentioned, higher polygon count allows for a better mesh displacement, however, at the cost of course of object size inflation.
Sincere thanks for sharing these nice rocks !