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View Full Version : Rendering advice regarding Displacement maps

dcarus
03-20-2005, 12:42 AM
Im hoping to use ZBrush and Maya for a project which involves using displacement mapped geometry. Up till now Ive been using mental Ray for my work, but as things have progressed Ive run into a problem.

Im using a subdivision approximation node to tesselate the geometry with the displacement map on it at render time. The tesselation is taking too much memory and too much time, even before I reach the kind of levels I require.

Is there any way I can improve the performance of mental Ray for this task? If not, can anyone recommend another renderer that will handle things better?

Thanks in advance

Dominic
FLCL
03-23-2005, 12:49 PM
Renderman! Despite being hugely expensive, it renders displacement maps very efficiently and quickly. Due to its micropolygon tesselation the quality can be extremely fine. Am not sure of settings for mr am afraid, been a while since i used it.
WireFX
03-24-2005, 07:23 PM
Well FLCL, Renderman hasnīt to be expensive! Beside the expensive version PRMan from Pixar there are several other renderers (http://www.dotcsw.com/links.html#renderers) which support micropolygon tesselation or adaptive tesselation. The renderer Air from Sitesgraphics (www.sitexgraphics.com) provides from version 3.0 on the "baking" of those displacements into *.obj or *.rib data, we wrote a small tutorial about this here.

http://www.wirefx.net/
FLCL
03-29-2005, 08:35 AM
Yes very true, haven't tried any of those out, but am sure they can do a similar effect
dcarus
04-02-2005, 05:33 PM
Thanks for the replys... it seems renderman is the way to go, although thats not to say Ive not had problems switching over...

regards

Dominic
WireFX
04-05-2005, 02:16 PM
http://www.renderman.org/RMR/OtherLinks/index.html#convert

lists a lot of converters which include also one for export out of Softimage or Metal Ray.
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