convert mental ray displacements to geometry?

[vfxbaby]

Not sure why you are trying to do this but once you edit your geometry in zbrush you could either export the various maps or you could just export the obj which is the geometry. as simple as that.

[Irie]

hey, thanks for the reply.

the reason for needing the displacements as geometry is for comping. I have several sprites that i need to place in a set that has displaced rock formations. i cannot mask the formations without converting the displacements to the geometry that will be represented in my set render.

so all im really trying to acheive is accurate geometry to use as a mask for sprite rendering in hardware

i dont, however, have access to zbrush. im hoping to do this in maya.

thanks

[Emil3d]

...I was wondering if any of you have ever heard of or accomplished the task of converting mental ray displacements to geometry?...
Would love to hear that this is possible but I'm afraid that it is not. I needed to do this on a few occasions but never found a way to accomplish this. I ended up adjusting the Maya settings to achieve similar displacement.

[Irie]

thanks for the input.

i think im just gonna hack it and do a topdown ortho view render of the ground occlusion and build curves based on the contact shadows.

then loft up a little and i should be able to get away with it then.

thanks!

[JulianS]

I dont know what u trying to say with MR Displacements but It is possible to convert Displacemets to geometry.

Just select the geo with the displacement texture. go to -> Modify -> Convert -> Displacement to Pologons

[Lorecanth]

Julien,
Thats just the maya displacement. If any of mental rays advanced displacement settings are used the geometry can look quite different. Irie as far as particles and sprites are concened have you looked at mrLiquid ?

Its a standalone maya to mental ray exporter (granted you have to have mental ray standalone)
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/plugins/rendering/mental_ray/3853.html

anyway it has options that let you render particles as various mental ray geo objects.

[Irie]

oooh.

thank you lore.

i am looking into that right now.

[daddyo]

with all the stuff you can bake out in MR, it's a shame that you can't bake out a piece of displaced geometry using Mental Ray.

Another possibility is using the textureDisplacePlane command to biuld your terrains. It's a Mel procedure thats not very documented, but you can find it in the help files... It uses any texture node to displace a poly plane with your UV resolution settings.... So it works for building elevation, mostly.


Output is quite fast and results in all quad geometry.

[Lorecanth]

I was playing with the points particles being rendered as mr hair primitives the other day. I assigned francesca's ctrl object illumination to the mr hair primitive generation... first time I've ever been able to light a scene with particles.

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