Displacement

#1

Can anyone point me to any detailed tutorials on displacement maps in Lightwave. I am having no fun with them at the moment and after posting in JT’s LW/ZB thread it has made me more determined than ever.

Cheers,

Glen

#2

They’re pretty easy once you get the hang of them.
Head on over to NewTek’s site for some great info.

There’s a ton of tutorials for free HERE from NewTek.

Best of luck.

#3

just be aware that normal displacement with UV mapped textures is broken :frowning:

#4

Originally posted by kretin
just be aware that normal displacement with UV mapped textures is broken :frowning:

Haven’t practiced serious displacements for a while, doesn’t remember it didn’t work.
What exactly doesn’t work ?

#5

normal displacement works nice, and fast, using procedurals or standard projection textures, but doesn’t work with UVs. The texture is read as 0 at every poly boundary in the texture and at the edges of the texture, and slows updates down to unworkable levels.

I should qualify too, this is prolly only an issue with subD’s, I imagine it works fine with poly geometry, although I haven’t tried it yet.

#6

Just loaded back some old crapy test, and it does work with uv and subd.
Would you like me to send you the scene ?

#7

yeah man, please do. If you’ve got it working… yay :slight_smile:

These are the results I get with subD object, UV and Normal Displacement…

#8

Dude, I don’t have your mail…
All I have is info@zerogravity.com or so

#9

Uploaded here :
http://mapage.noos.fr/facial4/Research.zip

Scene is crap, was for a thread discussing test, let me know if that work.

#10

You’ve got exactly the same problem there Facial… The part of your object where the UV map wraps around, well according to the image map should be totally smooth, 50% displaced, but it’s got all sorts of nasty artifacts.

Oh I made a boo boo earlier. It only slows down updates if you set the display subD level high. It always slows down renders while it sorts out the object. The following pic has the same subD levels for both renders. Bump (middle) only took 17 secs to render, Normal Displacement (right) took 15 mins, and 14 mins of that is calculating the model. The UV boundary errors in this pic are cleverly hidden (I realised afterwards :P)

Disp_eg.jpg800x283

#11

Ah shit ! Yeah, you’re absolutely right… Sorry man, I was not accurate enough…
Thanx for explaining :thumbsup:

#12

tis cool :slight_smile: you beat me to my edit :stuck_out_tongue:

BTW info@zerogravity will get to me… jonny@ is direct though

#13

Thanx again, nice arm :slight_smile:
Was a good sharing :slight_smile:

#14

Thanks for the help all.

Kretin: So was the arm render (third one) done with a normal displacementand a greyscale map as I would do for a bump map?

The reason I ask is than I am looking at Dans Inside LW 7 and it points to a plugin called LW_Displacement texture (page 1066) and I don’t see that in my list in object properties>deformations drop down. And I don’t have it to add either.

And as far as you know so far there is no work around for the UV edges rendering at 0?

That must be why I’m struggling with AUV tiling from ZBrush as this creates 1000’s of UV edges as you will know. I’m getting my models to look like ice crystals, jagged all over.

Any info welcomed.

G

#15

Yep Glen, if you want to use displacement maps from ZBrush you’re… well… stuffed :slight_smile:

The third pic is normal displacement on a UV map using a grey scale image.

Some of the tutes in Inside LW7 haven’t been updated for the last few releases, so it’s prolly a plug that was replaced by normal displacement… you might find it in LW5.5 :slight_smile:

The only workaround for this issue is to freeze your object, which of course presents other issues, but it does work. The errors only occur in subD objects.

That’s the reason I had to create Spawn at such a high poly count, cause I realised early on I couldn’t add detail using displacement, which was my first and ideal choice.

#16

Originally posted by southern
[B]Thanks for the help all.

Kretin: So was the arm render (third one) done with a normal displacementand a greyscale map as I would do for a bump map?

The reason I ask is than I am looking at Dans Inside LW 7 and it points to a plugin called LW_Displacement texture (page 1066) and I don’t see that in my list in object properties>deformations drop down. And I don’t have it to add either.

And as far as you know so far there is no work around for the UV edges rendering at 0?

That must be why I’m struggling with AUV tiling from ZBrush as this creates 1000’s of UV edges as you will know. I’m getting my models to look like ice crystals, jagged all over.

Any info welcomed.

[/B]

LW Displacement is not Normal Displacement which is right down next to morph mixer in the displacement tab in the object properties panel. It works differently then standard displacements in that it displaces either along the normals of a point (similar to smooth scale in modeler) or along an endomorph. You can control the effect with texture maps, procedurals, gradients, weight maps etc.

Does ZBrush support Normal MAPS or Normal DISPLACEMENTS?
Both arent the same thing. NORMAL Maps would be the way to go.
There is a free normal mapper here:
http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html
and a commercial one here:
http://www.evs3d.com/mw_intro.html

#17

Speaking of which… perhaps when Newtek fix normal displacement they might include support for normal maps, since tangent normal maps are the industry standard and Marvin’s plug only supports world normal maps.

I believe the Zbrush version Glen is using supports both normal displacement maps “and” normal maps…

#18

Originally posted by kretin
[B]Speaking of which… perhaps when Newtek fix normal displacement they might include support for normal maps, since tangent normal maps are the industry standard and Marvin’s plug only supports world normal maps.

I believe the Zbrush version Glen is using supports both normal displacement maps “and” normal maps… [/B]

It would be nice to model a very detailed mesh using geometry and normal/displacement maps and then be able to reapply all that as a normal map. Id love to see normal map support in LW. :slight_smile:

#19

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you use bump displacement (in the object tab) doesn’t it displace by the surface normal?

#20

Originally posted by Karmacop
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you use bump displacement (in the object tab) doesn’t it displace by the surface normal?

Bump displacement only works when subdivision is set to first which makes it not as useful for characters when you need to set Subdivision order to last.
The normal displacement plugin offers a few more options as well. Inverting the crumple texture for example doesnt work with bump displacement but does with normal displacement.
Normal displacement also allows you to activate endomorphs based on texture strength.