Newb render/material question

#1

Hey guys, I’m probably diving in over my head here since I’m totally new to Messiah but I’ve got a few questions that I couldn’t find answers for in the doc. I’m attempting to take a model from zbrush and load the displacement map for a quick test render and what I’ve done so far is… Load my model, then under the render/materials block I loaded my displacement map in the bump channel. Now I didn’t see a direct way to load the image as a displacement so I’m assuming there’s something I need to do under the bump map channel (excuse my wrong terminology for Messiah, I’m coming from Cinema 4d. ;)). After that I want to do a test render to see if every thing is in order and I noticed that there is no AA on by default so after throwing a light into my scene I turned on adaptive with a level of 1 but when I did a test render Messiah crashed about 50% into the render. :banghead: Er, so I guess my main question would be what do I need to do in order for Messiah to read my image in the bump channel as a displacement map? Also is there a particular bug that would cause the render crash like that? Thanks a lot for any help!

Patrick

Edit: The crash was a fluke I guess…it stopped so I’m happy. :stuck_out_tongue:

#2

In the render layout go to the surfaces tab and select the object in question. In the object panel set “Render Geometry” to “Pre-Generated Polygons”. Then set “Displacement” to 1.0. “Sub Level” is something you’ll have to tweak based on your ram and whether or not you are happy with the displacement…the manual says 2 or 3 is good. The amount of displacement is controlled by the bump channel.

#3

Patrick,

  1. Drop an texture map node into the shaderflow
  2. Load the image you want.
  3. Make sure Flip V is checked
  4. Check Remap and make sure it is set to min/max range is -1 to 1
  5. Select UV as your Map Type
  6. Attach the texture map node into the bump channel
  7. Adjust your bump value, I find 0.1 to be a good value
  8. Go to the Surface tab and set your Render Geometry to Pre-generated
  9. Set you Displacement to 1.0 and Sub Level to 3
  10. Adjust your sub level to a higher value to get better accuracy, but watch your memory consumption.

Cheers,

#4

Thanks guys! I’m starting to get the hang of this! :applause:

#5

Also make sure you tab the geometry so it is a MetaNurbs object. Otherwise you might get very strange bad results and long rendertimes.

#6

Great info, but just in case you were not aware, you no longer need to use a Remap node for the displacement texture. If you “F3” while on the TextureMap block, you’ll see a Remap control. This allows you to remap TextureMap’s output, and it already defaults to -1,1;)

-lyle

#7

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