Problems with Displacement on The Nemesis Car
Wanderer
Posts: 957
Hi,
Anyone who has been able to get the futuristic/armored Nemesis to look good with optional displacement maps--I'd really welcome your input about settings so I can do the same. Having a very hard time getting the smaller rivets to not just appear as a single raised line without fine details.
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Comments
Iray or 3Delight? Iray is limited by the mesh resolution - unlike 3Delight it can't displace at a sub-polygon level. You could try converting to SubD (Edit>Figure>Geometry>Convert to SubD) and upping the Render Division level, but you may not be able to get adequate detail at an acceptable memory level. Another option is to convert the displacement maps to normal, to to do a mix using displacement for bulk detail and normals for fine detail, but I'm not sure how many tools there are to automate that approach.
The Iray shader has subdivision on the texture level, so no need to subdivide the mesh itself.. Crank that up and see if that helps.
In previous builds I was told that the surface division is less memory-efficient than the figure level - of course this may have changed with the newer Iray builds.
Also bear in mind that the whole figure will be divided to the maximum of the figure division level and the division levels on all surfaces, you can't use surface settings to selectively divide. The advantage of the surface setting is that it doesn't smooth the mesh, so if converting SubD causes issues with the model it will be the better choice.
Sorry, was occupied and forgot to get back to this sooner. Iray. Hmm... Thanks for your responses. Let me look at it again and see if I can use your suggestions to get closer to the end I'm seeking. I've even debated just removing some of the fine details from the displacement maps. But let me look at what you've said here more closely and do what I can. I'll get back with my results if I can get it to look halfway decent and let you know.
Perhaps someone could shed light on another issue I'm having. I re-opened the scene with the car in it, and the figure I have in the vehicle has hair, but the hair no longer appears when my view is from outside the car. If I move the view forward past the glass on the side or front, I can see the hair again. Otherwise, from outside the vehicle, the character appears completely bald.
If you do a spot render of the figure's head, from outside the glass, does the hair show up?
Yes, strangely enough. Am I doing something wrong?
What's the surface settings for the windows?
If you are using the non-Iray mode for the viewport, it's quite likely just to be the common layered transparency 'bug' (it's not really a bug, but a limitation on the way the viewport can display multiple transparent objects when layered).
Okay, surface on windows is using Iray glass shader, thin. It may be the limitation you mention. It's just that I could see it fine when I first placed it in the scene. It's only after loading the scene again that it refuses to appear until render, and I've re-loaded it a couple of times, rebooted, re-started Daz, all that jazz. I'll just have to cope with it... maybe I'm a little too OCD.
I'm actually just learning this aspect of 3d rendering really. I mean I was successful with a previous figure using displacement maps in Iray before, so this is really frustrating to me. Anyway, here's an example of what I've got in results:
First test (with figure converted to SubD):
Settings:
displacement strength: 1.27
Min disp: -.30
max disp: .80
SubD Disp level: 4
Render SubD Level Mini: 1
Then I pushed the Render SubD Level to 3.
No combination of these numbers seeems to improve the image result much. Pushing the Render SubD to a higher number than 3 just locks up my system forcing me to shut down Daz Studio through task manager. The peaks may get smoother, but they still look like lumps seen in the images already. The peaks may get sharper, but they never begin to look like actual rivets. What am I doing wrong?
Here is an example of what I was able to achieve previously using displacement:
So, seeing what I achieved before with the proper settings, not being able to figure this out is very frustrating to me. I expect the rivets to pop like those in my example image above.
You can probably get away with a quick and verry dirty solution.....just drop the displacement map in the bump channel (if there is no map in that channel) and fidle with it's slider until it looks right. If I make rivets I always go for height/bump map and/or normal maps......now of course you don't see the rivets to well at some angles but that is a scarafice I take in the face of lightness of model.....especially in Iray were most of the DAZers and DAZettes don't have acre upon acre of VRAM to spare.......
Greets, ArtisanS
Thanks. I don't think I tried that. Will report back.
I may have to abandon the effort. There were bump maps, and turning the displacement off and pushing the bump up resulted in the small rivets at least appearing to recede into the surface, but the larger rivets appear just as messed up as they do in the displacement. Dropped the disp maps into the bump just to see what would happen and it did the exact same thing as when they were in displacement. So... maybe it's me, or maybe it's not. If anyone else has a suggestion, I'm all ears.
My guess is that the map is at fault...
thanks... I'm wondering if that is indeed the issue