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General => Terragen Discussion => Topic started by: radix on November 18, 2016, 12:43:06 AM

Title: displacement on imported obj
Post by: radix on November 18, 2016, 12:43:06 AM
Hi everyone,

I have an .obj of a rock and I'd like to apply displacement to it. I'm going into the internal network of the parts shader, loading my displacement texture, and playing with the displacement multiplier. I've noticed that no matter how high I crank the displacement multiplier, my displacement texture seems to be applied more like a bump map than actual displacement, meaning the silhouette contour of the geometry does not change.

Is this just a limitation in terragen or is there a way to get the displacement on the imported obj to behave like displacement? Another approach?
Title: Re: displacement on imported obj
Post by: Dune on November 18, 2016, 03:02:17 AM
You can turn on force displacement in the object tab (default is Ray-Traced), but it depend on the polycount whether it will look good.
Title: Re: displacement on imported obj
Post by: radix on November 18, 2016, 03:14:41 AM
Right under my nose. Thanks Dune!
Title: Re: displacement on imported obj
Post by: Oshyan on November 18, 2016, 04:40:33 PM
Displacement is applied as bump mapping when objects are rendered with the ray-tracer, which is enabled by default for quality and speed reasons. The micropolygon renderer (old renderer) can handle some limited displacement on objects. In the future we'll make the ray-tracer capable of handling proper displacement as well. In the meantime changing the rendering method to "force displacement" on a per-object basis can get displacement working. It does not work properly with populations however.

- Oshyan
Title: Re: displacement on imported obj
Post by: luvsmuzik on November 22, 2016, 03:29:27 PM
Quote from: Oshyan on November 18, 2016, 04:40:33 PM
Displacement is applied as bump mapping when objects are rendered with the ray-tracer, which is enabled by default for quality and speed reasons. The micropolygon renderer (old renderer) can handle some limited displacement on objects. In the future we'll make the ray-tracer capable of handling proper displacement as well. In the meantime changing the rendering method to "force displacement" on a per-object basis can get displacement working. It does not work properly with populations however.

- Oshyan

I am relieved to know this, as I test an object first before populating it and have noticed that displacement is not consistent. I wondered if it was displacing the whole population or individual objects. I think there is another method in another program that does displacement relative to the camera so that the renderer does not have to calculate displacement of objects in the far distance. I do not know much about it, just that it exists.