Vdisp play

[Dune]

You know, Michael, I was thinking exactly the same as you about the cave painting. Seriously. The bulging top is a bit lower poly due to the lopoliness of that particular lobe in the mesh. I think. I have to experiment with higher density and see what that does to the map, in relation to the size of the final map (which is small in this case).

[bobbystahr]

Thanks Hannes. There are some threads about vdisp, but it's actually quite easy. In mudbox (for one) you can pull out shapes in a subdivided plane, the add a base lores plane, and have a (world space) vector displacement map extracted (calculates the difference). This is a 32-bit color tif or exr (mine was only 8Mb). Import it using an image map shader, set colors to 'are lineair', set a decent size and attach to a vector displacement shader. I only had to negate the Z for this to work properly (don't know why). Then set size of displacement. Etcetera...

Playing about with this with varying results. I found a few of those coloured maps on google and in Photoshop made them 32 bit and saved as both .exr and .tif. About 2 M from the .exr but 20 something M for the .tif, but I'm going with it as that's way more info and it seems to work O K. Will post a test render when I complete one.

[bobbystahr]

Has anyone tried Normal maps?

[Clay]

Pretty cool!

[Dune]

I did another shape in Mudbox yesterday, and posted the 32-bit file in file sharing. So grab it and test it out. Here's what I made of it with some strata and displacements.

[Hannes]

Looks great. Interesting thread!!

[bobbystahr]

I did another shape in Mudbox yesterday, and posted the 32-bit file in file sharing. So grab it and test it out.

My hero...thanks Ulco...

[DocCharly65]

Great!

I like the first one a bit more, because the haze seemes more relistic in that scene to me. But both are cool!

[bobbystahr]

I did another shape in Mudbox yesterday, and posted the 32-bit file in file sharing. So grab it and test it out. Here's what I made of it with some strata and displacements.

This is a cool way to model terrain but I am having a problem, likely through not knowing what I'm doing yet, but any ideas on why I'm getting isolated(to only this spot it seems) tearing in the vector displacement?

[Dune]

What do you mean by tearing? Your camera isn't under surface, by any chance? The map can be blown up if you set displacement too high, it's all in some kind of proportion. With 500m and displacement 1 it works, but if you reduce the area to 5m displacement should also be reduced.

[bobbystahr]

Well I started fresh and got a scene to render, set it up for an overnight render and it was maybe 20% done in 6:30. Does that seem long on a 1280x720, D .6 AA 4 ? Does using Vector Displacement slow TG 3 down?

[bobbystahr]

What do you mean by tearing? Your camera isn't under surface, by any chance? The map can be blown up if you set displacement too high, it's all in some kind of proportion. With 500m and displacement 1 it works, but if you reduce the area to 5m displacement should also be reduced.

Looking back on that .tgd I noticed I'd sized the image map to 2048x2048. Likely that was my error. Thanks for the input

[Dune]

6+ hours for only 20% of such small a render is very long. Depends on your machine of course. My i7 turned the last 2 images out in half an hour each, detail 0.7, AA6. I don't think it really slows the rendering. Vey small additional displacements do.

[bobbystahr]

6+ hours for only 20% of such small a render is very long. Depends on your machine of course. My i7 turned the last 2 images out in half an hour each, detail 0.7, AA6. I don't think it really slows the rendering. Vey small additional displacements do.

Thanks man, guess it's a sick old dual core AMD that's draggin me down...

[bobbystahr]

Anyone try this with a Lake? Here's my quick n dirty test. I've added the .tgd  as if you dl'd the map from Dune, that's the only image in the pic.