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

[Ruy]

Thank you ,I was able to download the model and the 16 bit map.

Now the question , I flipped verticaly the image in photoshop and saved it as a 16 bit grayscale tif , but lightwave can't open the new file from photoshop , any suggestions? I also convert it to rgb and had no results, I used it as a bmp but the displacement only makes the image bigger or smaller.....

Ruy

[emihich]

Sorry ,know very little of Lightwave, but those posts explained a lot to me.
I rendered both with Max native displace and V ray .With V Ray , had to
convert to Edit Poly and used extremely low Amount and Shift values(less than 0,3. Well, Max dispacement is maybe less acurate ,didn´t try with 4x Meshsmooth, however.Surprise to me is Default Scanline renderer and display
combination rocks.The fastest.
But had to struglle to get Vray better results.

Regards

[Ruy]

This image is the frustrating result. Had to smooth it in lightwave modeler and apply the shadows as a texture. Lightwave's manual on displacement textures only covers half a page from a total of a thousand pages all over the book , and even in that case it doesn't has a tutorial on how to use it accurately . I've revied the lightwave posts and tried them all.

Sorry , maybe I need an upgrade or something .

[strongarm]

you need 7.5 I think. You also need to down load a plugin that is free from a third party forget the
name but it works were the built in one seems to fail. go to flay.com and do a search
for a displacement plugin or go to the newtek forum and do a search. I know personally it works as I
have done four different model displacements with zbrush into lightwave 7.5c-d and 8 mac. You need
to convert the 16 bit gray scale to 8 bit gray scale to use it on the mac. You loose some detail but
usually its not bad.

hope this helps
strongarm

[wierdPal]

Why do you need to convert it to 8 bit on the Mac? Is that a LW specific thing?

[strongarm]

actually lightwave doesn't handle 16bit grey scale tiffs but someone has written a plugin so it imports
them for the pc. the code is available but no one has made a mac version. so there is a way, it
just hasn't had anyone to make it available on the mac. but natively the answer is no, it doesn't support
them on the pc or the mac. I am not sure it uses the extra data anyway. Lightwave is a little behind
in this regard. It does work well though, don't get me wrong. I wouldn't have bought zbrush without
testing it in lightwave first.

strongarm

[aurick]

Hello strongarm,

Please check out this thread: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/sho...134#post173134 It contains a complete tutorial for getting great results in LightWave using the Lynx plugin.

FYI: This thread is also linked to from the FAQ>Other Apps>LightWave section here at ZBC. There is more info there for you, as well.

[strongarm]

Thanks for the info but again its a pc only lightwave plugin. If your on a mac and lightwave
you have to convert to 8bit grey scale to get displacement maps to work. I wish it wasn't that way but until some
one compiles the 16bit tiff loader for the mac its only for the pc. they come in as garballed garabage
and don't work unless you convert them before hand. Until the mac version of zbrush 2 is released
witch is suppose to be now, you really didn't need this plugin but its becoming very important. I can
get by with 8bit for now. It works well enough but this is important info for mac people upgrading.
thanks again for posting the links as I had forgotten were I had picked them up.

strongarm

[wierdPal]

Is the source code available?, and do you need a LW dev kit to compile it?

[edit]
I checked it out. It looks like more work than it's worth. There is no source code for the "loader" if that's what it is. But there is the libtiff library which I have used a few times.

[Przemek]

Hi all can anyone tell me the settings for max6 final render plugin?
I noticed there was 2 people rendering it with this plugin,
where do I put the displace map ?
do I use the regular displace modifier
or I have to do something in the render window options Thans all for the help

[richardsan]

i hope i didn't miss another renderers try at this...
3 subdivisions to get to the mesh on the left, then the application of the reduced bit displacement map on the right...

i guess mentioning the application i used for the render is in order.
strata 3d CX

[jotajota]

http://lynx.aspect-design.de/plugins...place_info.htm

[ashaiad]

another go at it with Maya and MR
I did the same stpes as before in my post
Auto contrast in photoshop , flip it save it as RGB
in maya i did 2 tests with Maya aproximation

[Jason Belec]

ashaiad, this is why I don't use MR. If you were to install Liquid to export from Maya to REYES (Renderman complaint) like Pixie or 3Delight or Renderman it will render in less than 40 seconds, especially under 3Delight even with a 450MHz system and 768MB RAM. This is for the maximum detail you will ever ask for.

[gardellalozano]

Very nice, would you like a step by step XSI/Zbrush2 in Radical Magazine?