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View Full Version : How much memory for Displacement Mapping?

E17JO1
12-07-2007, 06:29 PM
Quick Question:

I know it's kind of useless when people get more than 2 gigs of memory for their system seeing how most programs & XP and such don't use more than that.
If i'm going to be doing some displacement mapping in Maya using Renderman v.2, and after reading how true displacement mapping takes up a lot of memory, would it be necessary to have about 4 gigs on my system as opposed to my current 2 gigs?

I know it wouldn't hurt to have more but has anyone seen a big difference in their render times or notice that more memory is needed when displacement mapping?
Myliobatidae
12-07-2007, 06:45 PM
I might be wrong about this, but Prman handles displacements quite easily, I would think that it wouldn't impact your ram all that much, it certainly won't impact your rendertimes, and you can switch to windows X64 if you want to utilize more ram...
E17JO1
12-07-2007, 06:59 PM
Great! Thanks a lot for the info. I thought I'd since i'm new to displacement mapping and didn't want to spend some cash on stuff I don't really need!
Mauritius
12-08-2007, 12:26 PM
If i'm going to be doing some displacement mapping in Maya using Renderman v.2, and after reading how true displacement mapping takes up a lot of memory, [...]
If rendering with displacement vs. rendering w/o takes a lot more memory, you probably want to check your displacement bounds.
If they are not set as tight as possible, you might waste a lot of memory unneccesarily.

The other thing is using displacement for modeling. That is a mistake people tend to make. If you have a low res object that you displace into its final shape (e.g. using maps from Mudbox or zBRush), make sure the low res mesh is as close to the final surface as possible. Ideally it will go through the average of the displaced surface and you displace in both directions (inwards & outwards).
As a result this allows you to specify a tighter displacement bound and thus require less memory during rendering.

Cheers,

Moritz
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