CGTalk - Mental ray displacement help

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phyle

11-24-2006, 04:32 AM

Hi all,
I cant for the life of me work out how to get good looking displacement in mental ray.
Im using maya 6 so I might be missing some of the newer features, am I?
This is the scene Im testing in and this pic is the absolute finest tesselation i can get.

Its using a maya displacement node hooked up to the mentalray/custom shader/displacement shader in my shading group.

I have a mental ray displacement approximation node set up. the settings for this pic were-

parametric
U subDiv 7
V subDiv 7

If I set it higher than 7 the image is unchanged. lower than 7 and the quality goes down. Ive played around with all the types(spatial, curvature etc) and cant seem to find anything that looks better than this. I just cant make the polygons smaller, anyone have any recomendations?

thanks for any help.

Lamster

11-24-2006, 07:31 AM

Not sure if mental ray 3.2 or 3.3 has this, but you should be using spatial mode and fine method. Set your max subd to something like 5 and your length to something like 0.25 for starters with view dependant mode on.

Terence

phyle

11-25-2006, 05:58 AM

thanks for your help Lamster.
It sucks because those settings are crashing maya. It seems to be the Fine approx style setting.
Is that generally the best method for detailed displacement? Im going to try it on another computer, maybe ill have to rebuild my scene..

Saturn

11-25-2006, 06:10 AM

Use fine method .
as lemster said but max value to 5 and lenght to 1 not .25 in view dependant mode

phyle

11-26-2006, 10:26 PM

Thanks Saturn! the length to one seems to stop it crashing, and Im getting some pretty good results now.

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