Daz, have you checked your displacement lately?
So I thought I would re-install daz on my laptop for a couple reasons. One, I can see what 4.9 is like and two, if im bored and my wife and I are just sitting in front of the tv, I can assemble a scene. So I downloaded V4 and several morphs and decided to do a quick test render of her wearing her muscle Maps with the displacement preset on. This is the result in 3dl (cpu only for iray). I checked the displacement settings. The maps are set to 50%, Maximum displacement is set to 14.0 and Minimum Displacement is set to -14.0. Hmmm... Im sure that this is only an isolated case for this particular product... at least 70% sure...
Post edited by AnotherUserName on

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Do the muscle maps have DS material presets, or are these Poser presets?
That image made my day!
Its the DS presets.
I get that result if I try to render the maps in Iray, using 3DL they render perfectly fine. Are you sure your renderer isn't set to Iray?
Top of the Render Settings pane:
Yah im in 3dl.
Im getting the same result with both the flat and glossy maps.
Those values don't seem right, Studio's displacement min and max are in centimeters.
Pretty goofy isnt it? Its like some skinned, cartoon monkey.
I don't think I've ever actually played with the muscle maps since I got them. But, I would have remembered that if I had! Freaky! No clue as to anything helpful to say.
So I have tried several times to confirm whether im just suffering from another case of "user error" but I cant. Nothing in the scene is set for iray as far as I can tell. V4, muscle maps with DS presets, one distant light with a camera, headlamp off. Render settings on 3dl. I get the same result everytime. Off to write a bug I suppose.
Can anyone else repro this?
I just tried this, default camera and a distant light, Daz Studio 4.9. 3delight is rendering normally for me, but in the Iray preview window and rendering in Iray I'm seeing the weird monkey lady.
I'm wondering if this has something to do with the displacement maps being saved in .tif format. I resaved and replaced them with jpg and the displacement works correctly in Iray. I can't reproduce the 3Delight issue you're seeing though.
See, heres my thought. The first thing i did after loading v4 was to drop the uber shader on her and just check out how it looked in iray in the preview window. I was curious to see if my laptop cpu could hack a simple iray preview. After that I started messing around with the 3dl stuff and thats when this happened with the muscle displacement maps. Now I really dont know how all the technical stuff works in the background but it seems that either there is some sort of memory instance occuring which thinks that v4 is still uber shaded or maybe the aux window settings are overriding the 3dl preference in the render settings.
Seems like the uber shading may be an important repro step that I left out. But it happens all the time. I can load v4 from a fresh boot, use the displacement preset on the muscle maps, render (not preview) in 3dl and I get the same thing.
Di you install through DIM or Connect?
As I am a dinosaur, I only install via manual .zip files.

Oh yah, I dont know if it matters, but I customize my categories. So my files do not reside in My Daz Library but another folder that I created.
Did you try using the Purge Memory script before reapplying the 3DL shaders?
No. Ive been able to repro from a fresh boot. That is, without applying the uber shaders. Just straight up 3dl.
The displacement on the muscle maps is set very high by default (50% with -14 and +14) so perhaps that's why a lower quality jpg negates that, and the values simply need adjusting? I dunno why but it looks correct to me in 3Delight, but definitely not in Iray, or why the OP is having trouble in 3Delight. It is Very mysterious.
Because I was cursed at birth by the Machine God. Hence, if bugs exist in software (which they do), THEY will find me. Fortunately, Im pretty damn good at finding them myself. Had I the time this weekevd (prepping for a family thing) i'd be seeking this one out with great and furious vengance!
Unrelated to this issue, I didn't know there was a purge memory script. Perhaps you could let me know where to find this as I've been needing something like this and I think being able to use one would help a memory issue I've been having with DS.
DAz Studio Formats > My DAZ Library > Scripts > Utilities. You can also select the drop down box from Scripts at the top of the screen and it may be in there as well.
Thanks, I'll look there!
It's the D|S materials presets. I hit this problem every now and then — the ones supplied with the Muscle Maps are ancient, the script format has changed many times since then, and recent D|S versions seem to have problems understanding some files of this vintage. I'm not sure why Displacement is the only parameter being mangled, though.
Displacement maps work quite differently in Iray. Most surfaces need to be SubDed in order for it to work properly... that's why there's a SubD parameter built into the surfaces pane.
Having said that, this *also* means that using displacement maps will take up much more memory in Iray compared to, say, normal or bump maps which don't need the SubD parameter...
edit: There was a thread about this a while back, about memory requirements and so forth of Iray I believe...
Thanks SpottedKitty, a known issue. My real interest in moving to 4.9 was bug fixes... and whats the first thing I see?
It is the min/max settings, that is a 14 centimeter displacement between them, reset -1.4 and 1.4. Images show simple displacement map and result on 1 meter plane at your settings in 3Delight.