To displace or not displace

[BrandonD]

You pay a high price for using fine displacement in most packages. MAX's scanline renderer currently uses Mental Images' Mental Matter surface approximation libraries to handle displacement. It's useable, but not too efficient with polys (works best with NURBS - go figure). PRman has always been the king of displacement based on its REYES algorithm, but that's changing. Other renderers for MAX (VRay and probably soon Final Render and Brazil) use more modern displacement techniques that don't require so much overhead. Mental Ray 3.0 also uses a more efficient technique, but we haven't seen a MAX-bridge to it yet.

So my suggestion would be to use bump mapping if you can. If not, use surface approximation displacement sparingly. In fact, if you can get away with it, try using the Displace modifier (run a material through it) and set it to activate only at render time.

[Stygian]

I'm just starting but I've noticed that too . The meshsmooth seems to go a little overboard . is there any way to tone it down a bit or have I just not learned enough yet ?:curious:

[chudofsinister]

Thanks BrandonD for the indepth info. I had noticed the improvement when using displacement on nurbs surfaces, but who wants to do characters in nurbs anymore. Simple answer to avoid alot of debate, not me.

There are three different settings for applying the meshsmooth modifier, the classic one has the least amount of distortion in my opinion but you pay for it in other areas.

[Dave Black]

One other little note, but there are ways to control meshsmooth. First, you can adjust the vertex weights. Then, there is this little toggle button that most people overlook. "Smooth by smoothing groups". If you want hard and soft edges together, you can just asign different smoothing groups to them and set that toggle in meshsmooth.

Just if anyone has'nt noticed it before.

GOOD LUCK!

:thumbsup:

[MFreywald]

believe it or not, one of the best tools I've seen for doing displacements using maps is Bryce. And since the only model you can export from bryce is a landscape object. This is perfect. If you've got access to bryce, just make a landscape object, go into the edit tool and select to use a bitmap as the terrain elevation map. Then you can increase the detail to your likeing. Only other 'professional' tool I've seen do displacements fast and good was FormZ.

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