(hopefully) quick question about displacement tesselation

#1

Hey CG Folk! Long time reader, first time poster.

So hopefully this is a quick question, I’ve done a bit of investigating.

I’m rendering a displacement map from Mudbox 2012 to Maya 2012 (64 bit) using Mental Ray (Production settings with IBL and Final Gather), and I’m getting what looks like poor tesselation. It’s very telling when you zoom into the model, but is still kind of noticeable from a distance,to me, anyway. The following renders are displacement only (no normal mapping)

here’s zoomed in:

vs the model in mudbox:

In Mudbox, my displacement settings are: Raycasting, closest to source mesh, search distance 2.95 (found by trial-and-error to get best range-of-values in disp map). Anti-aliasing set to max (8x), map is 2k, 16-bit tiff. Source mesh vs base mesh:

I got the same result regardless of anti-aliasing setting, using 8 bit pngs or 16 bit tiffs.

To me the artifacts really look like triangular which makes me think tesselation. I’m thinking it could be either:

  1. needing a higher poly base mesh
    or
  2. a better approach to tesselation (maybe Mental Ray’s Approximation Editor?)

Any advice? I appreciate it, folks. Thank you!

#2

Yeah, you’ll want to use the Approximation Editor. If you just smooth by pressing 3, it won’t necessarily give you the density you need.

#3

wow, that is interesting…

this looks more like the errors I get from transferring maps in Maya when the high poly mesh doesn’t have smooth normals, but I’m not sure that applies to your case from MudBox.

#4

Meloncov, thanks, that was it. I appreciate it.

#5

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