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

[wurger]

Zeddicus,

Both renders use the Displace modifier. I posted them because the Mental Ray render seemed a bit more detailed than the scanline rendering.

I attempted using the Mental Ray displacement but got nowhere (didn't have time to mess with it too much...I was at work after all). I had even less luck with Final Render but wasn't in the mood to try and figure out why the Micro Triangle Displacement in Final Render wasn't working.

[Reactor]

Stew, I appreciate the quick mention of why the shape is a little different.... although I'm not sure I agree that means you can't get it looking the same. See my renders in Poser on page 5. The second one looks almost exactly as it did in Zbrush. I'm still curious about the banding though, when you increase the displacement to 2.5.

[policarpo]

A little more exploration.

Just wanted to see what it looked like with dramatic lighting.

still not 100% perfect, but passable...

This is fun, thanks again for offering up the model Pixolator. It really helps to determine if zBrush will work with our rendering engines.

So far, my LW tests have been unsuccesful.

[koye]

policarpo set your subpatch tessalation to BEFORE the displacement object modifier!

also the remember the display tessalation can be way lower than the render tessalation.

it is the order that is of extreme importance

[NilreMK]

3dsMax scanline
Rendered in 11 seconds on a 1.8ghz
With 17 lights, all casting 1024 shadowmaps.

I'm cheating though. The details are from a normal map, they arnt real polygons. I'm only rendering 5440 polygons.

[policarpo]

having some more fun, this time with instancing.

woo hoo!

C4D roxx!

rendered on a 1ghz PowerBook with 768mb RAM.

I'll wait to do a GI test on my Dual 2.8 XEON at home.

[Fouad B.]

Dual Xeon... (faint)

[policarpo]

[stew]

Reactor:
What exactly do you mean by banding? If you get holes in the mesh, then you need to increase the displacement bounds. If you see polygon edges, that are artifacts of the different subdivision schemes.

In any case, you should add a math node that subtracts 0.5 between the displacement map and the displacement channel, otherwise the head gets "inflated".

[Flo]

another image rendered with AIR.
took 2:49 on an Athlon 1400




@MINg120: seeing your image i guess you've subbed 0.5 and resaved the texturemap. that's why your image looks not right cause you only have pos. displacement cause all the neg. values felt below zero and weren't saved in your texturemap. at least that's what bugged me first and made my images look quite identical to yours.

[somlor]

Slow and Flo: Those look great. Are those defaultsurface? I'm just curious because you don't appear to be having the banding issues around the neck and I'm wondering how you achieved that. The banding didn't show up until I started rendering with shaders that calculate specular.

Zendoftheworld:Are you also using normalmap_displace.sl?

[triztan]

hi,
i saw examples of 3dsmax using mentalray in this thread. the only thing missing where the settings. so if you are so kind to post your settings for mentalray in 3dsmax i will be very happy.

my own tests showed only an "inflated" head with a rough noisy surface. and the rendertimes where beyond on my dual xeon 3.2 ghz computer.

thanks for any info,
daniel

[Zeddicus]

Max 6 + Mental Ray

- Displacement map flipped vertically and resaved in Photoshop as 16-bit RGB TIF file, no compression, no color management applied or embedded profile.

- Map loaded into material editor slot as bitmap, blur 0.01 (doesn't seem to matter with MR which ignores it, but good habit anyways to prevent banding if you use another renderer such as Vray), RGB offset -0.5 (map will look black, but it's not really and negative displacement is still there). By the way, if you didn't flip the map in Photoshop, set V tiling to -1.0 so that it renders properly.

- Using a second slot in the material editor, I applied a standard material with mental ray displacement shader unlocked (see heading mental ray Connection near bottom) and displacement map instanced as the extrusion map. Object Independant: checked / Displacement Length: 1.0 / Extrusion strength: 12.0 / the rest at default.

- For render options - View: Checked / Edge Length: 1.0 (higher speeds thing up but lowers render quality, lower setting slows things down but improves render quality) / Max Displace: 15.0 / Max Level: 6 (play around for best speed to render quality ratio)

Note: If you get a log error about your displacement map, make sure it's a proper 16-bit RGB TIF as stated above. 16-bit greyscale works, but gets converted to RAW and also is more likely to show banding.

The render posted previously in this thread (render time 1:40 at 640x480 / default render settings used except for those that were displacement related / two omni lights using shadow mapping):

[MrBraun]

Just the last try:

+ Saved displacement map to 8 bit and flipped vertically!
+ Hypernurbs render level 5.
+ Displacement Height 0.7 m
+ Texture Filter with MIP sampling
+ Contrast is set to 95%
+ Default light (no shadow) and MODEL SCALED 4X !!

[Zendoftheworld]

Hi Solmor,

Quote: "Zendoftheworld:Are you also using normalmap_displace.sl?"

No - I am using a standard displacement shader.

Regards,
Zendoftheworld...