Better texture using displacement map with mental ray?

#1

Hi there,
I have this model I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks… but I still can’t get a good result with the textures. I am new with this, but I’ve been looking around for days now… and as usually happens, I have a deadline, so I would really appreciate if someone with more experience could give me a hand with this.
This is a character I am doing for an animated short, so keeping rendering under reasonable times would be great. The renderer I have is mental ray.
I have one single mesh (around 12000 polygons) I modelled in maya. I imported it into mudbox to work a bit on the shapes but I also added many details on the skin. I took it to a subdivision level of 5.
Looks like this: http://irenelema.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2014/03/textures02.jpg
I am not expecting to keep all the detail, but the most accurate, the better :slight_smile: I’ll have some close shots of this character.
I cannot export the model from mudbox to maya directly (there is a bug or something). So I exported the mesh in level 0 and the displacement map. These are the settings that gave me the best result so far: http://irenelema.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2014/03/export.png
After some work I managed to clean the UVset and the displacement map. So now I have what i believe is a decent result :slight_smile: http://irenelema.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2014/03/textures-05.png
However, as you can see, most of the detail is lost, and since she is an old woman, it would be great to have some wrinkles and so on. I tried adjusting the settings in the approximation editor, but I doesn’t really work.
I still have to model and finish other characters, so I can make some tests, but I cannot spend more time reading threads and watching tutorials! :banghead: So please, if anyone has a good idea on how to make it better, I would really appreciate it!