CGTalk - is it possible to re-use displacement?

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j00ey

01-08-2007, 05:23 PM

[apologies if this has been covered before but I can't find anything...]

I have a model which has a displacement shader as does not deform and I'm trying to work out if I can get mental ray to perform the displacement once and then reuse the result... with no luck.

I tried turning 'Optimize animation detection' on but then it renders one frame ok and the rest are just black. Surely there must be a way of doing this...

Thanks in advance
J00ey

qrichardson

01-08-2007, 08:01 PM

What about "baking" the displacement?
I think the procedure might be to "bake" the displacment, save out the model and re-import it. That way you have geometry with all the details.
Similar in process as exporting a model out and using it in Zbrush and bringing it back in.

j00ey

01-09-2007, 06:27 PM

Thanks for that. I'm not sure what you mean by baking the displacement though... do you mean convert displacement to polys? I've tried that but the result is pretty crummy - good for viewport reference I suppose but not fine enough [and there aren't any options to control it unless I'm missing them]
thanks again anyway
J

Exo7

01-10-2007, 12:31 AM

The options for Displacement to Polygones are in the shape of the original object, under Tesselation (and Advanced Tesselation of course). I could have pretty good results playing with the texture threshold, error and try rules :shrug:

See this thread too:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=443649

Cheers !

j00ey

01-10-2007, 08:35 AM

Ah! thanks very much, I'll have a good look into that.
J

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