Wayne & Zap's Vector Displacement Shader

[dustinbrown]

This looks fuggin amazing!

http://vimeo.com/10730942

http://www.psychocore.com/

AFAIK this isn't something we can use if we're baking our displacement maps out of ZBrush.

[bignewf]

Wow! That is pretty cool.

[scottimation]

Yeah, currently it's for Mudbox to maya/max. Would be interesting to know if Pixologic is working on something like this.

[womball]

That would be awesome for animations and animated displacement maps!

[dustinbrown]

It would be awesome for a lot of reasons. It completely negates the argument for using voxel sculpting apps for one thing.

[spaz8]

Looks cool.. hopefully they get the Tangent space support soon.. since that is by far the most useful.

[Morph Division]

it is amasing but the problem with it lays in the rigging of the final model.
No rigger would want that task, and would probly spit at you for passing the model on.

Not to (but i will) mention usually even for folio pieces, most folk just import a high rez mesh to render....way more accurate.

It could work for a static shot of an environment (meaning no dynamics) then maybe might be better than low rez geo or vue or instances or paint fx (maya), but I just can't see how it would work in a production.

It feels like out of date tech, to use a bad analogy... vector displacement feels like Virtual reality, amasing (remember those atari pods) but whats more amasing and viable to the public? the answer is augmented reality (with the head tracking and the gps and the real time)....Perhaps vector displacement is just a stepping stone to a more useful tech.

However if it becomes useful in games, to surpass normal maps then wow....no really WOW.

but for now seems like a gimmic and i would rather see radial symetry work local the brush instead of the objects center.

EDIT: the way they did the waves in "Surfs Up" used deformers based on algorithyms so essentially it was tweakable through control not maps, which would require more work to edit

my two cents

cheers

[dustinbrown]

Admittedly, rendering a fully detailed head out of a low poly sphere is kind of gimmicky , so I take that demonstration with a grain of salt and so should you. What they're trying to impart is that it can help speed up render calculations for non-trivial forms. But no, from a production standpoint this tech doesn't take away the necessity for good base topology. It's just that it's a three channel map that projects in all three dimensions that makes it a step forward from standard displacement mapping.

[CowboyBunny]

It would be awesome for a lot of reasons. It completely negates the argument for using voxel sculpting apps for one thing.Granted this is amazing, but your way off with that comment. VDM are still linked to all the issues you get from stretching out forms from a single surface. So don't pack away your retopologising package just yet.

Love your steampunk character btwhttp://www.pixolator.com/images/smilies/biggrin2.gif


Vector libraries won't be now gimmick...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPezIU0c4zc

[KonginChains]

so how can i get his shader, it is no longer in his site, nor is www.psychocore.com/ running anymore.

Is there any other way to render out vector displacement maps in maya 2012 and vray 2.0 for maya?

[koshey]

yep. Maya 2012 supports vector displacement natively and mudbox 2012 can produce vector displacement maps from some very high poly objects(i got to 120M polys creating a vector displacement map to use on a lower poly mesh to render in 2012 maya's mental ray)