Rendering successful displacement in Maya 2008

[psi0nic_gh0st]

I've also noticed that sometimes 2008 will screw up the color map when rendering, in order to fix that you need to turn the default filter off in the image's node. Yet another broken 2008 feature. Maybe someone should start a 2008 workaround thread

[joie]

You guys say you can render 32bit displacement textures with Mental Ray..., Wich extension do you use?, I can't render any 32bit displcament map in TIF format in Mental Ray, MAYA refuses to render and stops the rendering process.

Any ideas?.

Thank's.

[psi0nic_gh0st]

There is a maya plugin "TiffFloatReader" but I think that's just for the thumbnail images. You could try loading that, maybe it'll do the trick, other than that I don't know, Tiff's have always worked fine for me...

[Elliott Mitchell]

joie,

I have three suggestions:

1) convert the Tiff to a .map format. Here is a link to (Edited) Francesca Luce's convert tiff to .map application off of Scott Spencer's post. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/sho...9&postcount=77

2) If you insist on using Tiff format then be sure there is no LZW compression on the Tiff.

3) Mental Ray has issues with some custom shaders / utilities and scripts. Check if your using any.

Best of luck

[JasonKing]

You are the main man, THANX!

[cgguru]

Hi everyone,

i have followed the step for the script but am still facing the seem problem. i am using maya 2008 ext2 for creating the displacement i have done the exact step shown in scott spencer's displacment tutorial and then run the script before rendering still giving me error help me

[Elliott Mitchell]

cgguru,

I don't have ext 2 installed for Maya 2008 yet so I don't know if that is a factor or not. What exactly is the error?

A couple of possibilities:

I've noticed you can only run the script once in a scene.

Tiffs can be a problem. No PSDs.

One thing that might be the problem (I've had it before and so have my students) is with the geometry. In Maya you might want to clean up the mesh. Non-manifold geometry has been a culprit in the past.

Does your model have UVs?

What else is in the scene?

You may want to export the mesh as obj and start over in a new scene.

Hmmmm?

Best of luck-

[cgguru]

Hi elliott,

Thanks for the reply

1. I exported it into a new scene and tried but same thing

2. using a .map file

3. Also did a clean up itz clean

4. Yes it has uv's and is showing the seem exactly where the
texture border is

6. The scene has only this head

7. Tried out with a new scene also same thing

[Elliott Mitchell]

cgguru,

I have few more suggestions.

Did you try to render without running the script first?

Check that all the normals are facing the same direction.

Maybe simplify by taking a plane from Maya and go through the process as an experiment. This reduces factors. If this works then you know it's not Maya.

MentalRay does use lots of RAM. Last year students of mine were having issues rendering character animations with MentalRay and Displacement mapping. Any single frame would be fine but a batch render would always render the same frame multiple times. It's a memory issue. You might want to go to the task manager if your using Windows and give the batch render or Maya app highest priority under the process tab.

If you want I could take a look at your files and try on my BOXX.

Best of luck

[Blu Ego]

Well, I think I have another Z4 feature request:
Smooth UVs as CCmesh does

Maybe I have to post this on Z4 whishlist thread

[matellion]

OH GOD u solve my problem

THX very much

[joie]

Hey guys, thank you all, my problem was I hadn't loaded the Tiff32 plugin, I wasn't aware of that plugin existence...

[dougBrooks]

Hey Everyone,

I'm having an issue with zbrush and maya 2008 and can't seem to find anyone that has a similar problem. I've done all the steps in Scott Spencer's Zbrush to Maya ZPipeline Guide as well as the Rendering Displacement in Maya 2008 Tutorial and it's mostly working with the exception of the alpha gain being 2.2.

I'm finding I need to scale up the alpha gain considerably from this value to get even close to what I see in Zbrush (e.g my current test is at 20). Does this sound familiar to anyone? I'm using multidisplace 3 entirely. Any thoughts on why this is?

thanks
Doug Brooks

[Goldenry]

I'm finding I need to scale up the alpha gain considerably from this value to get even close to what I see in Zbrush (e.g my current test is at 20). Does this sound familiar to anyone? I'm using multidisplace 3 entirely. Any thoughts on why this is?

thanks
Doug Brooks

Hey Doug,
Yes that sounds familiar. Everything works for me following the threads.
I've been bumping the alpha gain up between 30 and 40 to get what I'd expect. So the value of 2.2 definitely is not working here.
Have no clue as to why this is since I thought that using MD3 was supposed to eliminate this fiddling around.

[joie]

I found a relationship between the quality attribute of MD3 (I think it's called "subpixel" or something like that).

If you set it to "0", then the alphaGain in MAYA can be set to 2.2 and works as espected. But if you set it to "2", then the alphaGain must be set to 22 to get it working...