Rendering ZBrush Displacement-Maps In External Renderers (May 9th: 2nd file added)

[Jacob]

This is a quick test done in Turtle For Maya.
No cool materials or lighting, just a simple lambert shaded mesh to illustrate the geometry.

Resolution 800x600, supersampled.

Rendered in 26 seconds on an AMD 2.3 GHz with 1GB RAM.



Workflow:


1. Load the .obj file into Maya, and mark "render as subdivision surface" on the shape node of the mesh (level 3 for this test).

2. Assign a shading group to the mesh.

3. As displacement material for the shading group, choose "ilrDisplace".

4. Set displacement options to match ZBrush displacement:
- Flip texture = yes. (ZBrush flips while exporting, compared to maya's settings)
- Displacement offset = 0.5 (white = positive displacement, gray zero, black negative)
- Displacement scale. Adjust so that it matches the look you want.

5. Render.

Easy setup and very fast!

Jacob Munkberg
Illuminate Labs
http://www.illuminatelabs.com/

[cornel]

thanks for sharing, pixolator.
my results:

[skycastle]

Here is my test.
Rendered in Renderman.
Renders in less than 10 seconds.
No problems with banding or anything else.

Dave

[Scott Spencer]

Pixolator thank you so much for starting this thread.

Here is a test render from Maya 5 with Mental Ray

Settings:
Flip map in photoshop.
Save as a RGB Tif
Create a lambert shader with map in displacment channel.
Turn off feature displacement in attribute editor for the model.
Add Mental Ray subdivision and displacement nodes in the approximation editor

subdivision settings:
Spatial
min 4
max 9
length .100
view dependent
NOTE the min max settings here will increase render time as they are raised but they also seem to govern how much fine detail you get from the map in conjunction with the alpha gain and offset which seem to determine how much overall displacement you get in the pos and neg range.

DisplaceApprox:
Presets: FineViewHighQuality
min 0
max 7
length .250
view dependent

in the render globals set Mental ray to production quality and turn off backfaces under general settings (set to render front)

The most important setting I found was that the alpha depth is 14 and the offset -7 for this model.

Scott

[mickatt]

hi

testing with vray

-import obj
- apply a meshsmooth modifier to the object
- aplly a vray displacement modifier
set an amount of 8 and a shift of -4
resolution to 1024
render in 720 576 in 9 sec

[kobi1kobi]

skycastle, can you please share with me the maya file you made for rendering with PRMAN? I'm trying to use a slim displacement shader and with no luck.

I assume mailing the file would be less tediuos then giving a somplete walkthru, bu if you can also guide us on the right path...
thanks,

kobi

[YuYang]

fr

[Trurl]

Cinema 4D 6 CE:






(Sorry, my english is poor)

[Continuumx]

I have noticed in a majority of these external render solutions, cinema, turtle, and vray, that there are subtle bloatness of features missing. I would say all of these entries so far, should be re-evaluated and updated to get a much closer match to the post that pixolator posted.

[rray]

using XSI/MR here:



(hope Pixolator won't sue me for using a transparent bg hehe)

1st...same steps as Scott used for maya MR for the format:

-Flip map vertically
-Convert to RGB (MR can't read 16-bit greyscale TIF)

then inside XSI's render tree,

-convert image texture output to scalar
-subtract 0,627 from that value .. this seems to be necessary because "no displacement" does not seem to be 0,5 in the provided texture, but 0,627 instead
-multiply by 10 (this value must be guessed unfortunately. Continuumx--- this is also why probably some of the models might look a little bloated to you)
-plug into shader's displacement. Done

--------
Edit:
make sure before opening the map in PS to turn OFF color management! That's what caused the shift to 0.627 on my machine.

[kostas_mavromatis]

Hello!My name is Kostas Mavromatis,student from greece,new to z-brush,terrific thread rray,would you have an xsi rendertree detailed example?i just seem to do something wrong!!!thanx in advance

[nomiakasu]

Hi Everyone. This was a quickish test done with the new Rio version of Brazil RS for Max 6. Having problems with the hair and high frequency detail in the flesh although I can't tell so far if people are using bumps for that. Sorry the pic isn't a bit bigger but those are the limitations of the demo.

If anyone is still reading this thread and wants to see an extreme close up then reply and I'll upload one with all the stats etc.

[DaJuice]

Yyyello
Houdini Apprentice 6

Import obj file. As one previous Houdini user pointed out, the file extension must be in lower case so rename it from OBJ to obj.

Scale the model down to about 1/100th of it's original size to avoid shadow bias problems.

Apply the shader and set the model to 'Render As Subdivison Surfaces' in the object render parameters. You can also set the displace boound and turn up the shading quality if desired.

[Atog007]

rray, what are your setting for displacement in xsi ? are you using fine displacement ? i have a lot of trouble getting my disp maps working in xsi :P ( a lot of mental ray crash )

[edit] (just see that you said there are the same setting as Scott for mr under maya, guess it's fine displacement so ^^)

[spidex]

okie i think i got it.
Thanks for the infor Scott.
However, I wonder how anyone would have any clue to the kind of settings that one should insert in those attritbutes ...