ClawSnake - Rendered with MaxwellRender2.1

[SNorth]

Cheers for that, I gave it a try and it seemed to work, however it took ages for Voxelization and that was with one object. A precision of 128 is madness considering a hand drawn Disp map takes a low precision input.

It must be something wrong with the disp map, i.e something slight needs changing.

I reckon if we export the mesh and then export the disp map into Photoshop and create a simple grey and white drawing, it will come up perfect with no distortions (as a test).

By this I mean to trace over the disp map using only one colour (White) and obviously the grey background.

If this makes no sense, forgive me as I’ve had a few beers

[system]

Yes, 128 is perhaps to high, but it’s a starting point. Now we know that Maxwell can create good results.
In my Mushroom case the solution is somewhere between 40 and 128.
So, I’d say the solution is to give Maxwell something good to work with, by letting ZBrush generate as good disp.map as possible, by generating the dispmap with Adaptive and DPSubPix.
And perhaps also increasing the DispMap size, then more pixels will represent the sharp slope of the arrow sides (or whatever we sculpt…not sure it matters in this case since apparantly the 2048 map had enough info if precision was high enough.)

And then gradually increasing the precision from 40, to reach a value with good result / performance ratio.

it took ages for Voxelization and that was with one object. A precision of 128 is madness…

Then you shouldn’t try the option Adaptive in Maxwell
I read about it in the manual (yes, the one I rarely use :o) and it mentions that adaptive is resolution dependandt and gives half a pixel accuracy.
( Larger disp.map resolutions means higher precision, a quick test with a 1024x1024 map on single polygon plane seem to give a precision that is way, waaay above 128 )

If this makes no sense, forgive me as I’ve had a few beers

And if I don’t make much sense, it’s because I was up late late night, and the morning coffee doesn’t seem to be strong enough to wake up my brain

[Yruama]

Hey,

I did some test on my side today, because I really wanted to figure the map things out!
So I used a sphere from Zbrush and used a set of different brushes to make some stroke on it, making sure the UV’s where smoothed as I was stepping up subdiv level, then I generated 16bit and 32bit maps. then imported my basemesh in Maxwell, smoothed the edges using the recal button, after that I applied my 16bit map generated from Zbrush (Smooth UV_FlipV) precision in maxwell set to 20 and displacement setting set to default (2.0 - 0.5) and that’s what I got!!

[attach=211431]Lv1Mrg_16bitMaptTest.jpg[/attach]

regardless the way I was generating my displacement in Zbrush, it still rendered the same glitches there and then even using the basemesh at a higher subdiv , Not so good. I also tried 32Bit without any success, it doesn’t seems to do anything at all, but anyway then I looked at my smoothed geometry in Maxwell and realized it wasn’t uniformly smoothed, I was wondering if it would smooth out better in Maya so I exported my Basemesh to Maya then smoothed it out, and exported back in Maxwell as a MXS file. Opening my brand new MXS, the smoothed geometry of Maya was preserved. and was indeed much better than the way Maxwell smooth edges.
then I apply the same setting than the previous render above and that’s how it came out. the precision was only set to 20 so if you are picky you could set it up a little higher to make sure the edges stay sharp.

[attach=211436]16bitMap_Test.jpg[/attach]

it looks pretty good to me!! no voxelisation that takes for edges, so from now on that how I will render my model in Maxwell using 16bit maps.

Attachments

[system]

in Maxwell, smoothed the edges using the recal button…smoothed geometry of Maya was preserved. and was indeed much better than the way Maxwell smooth edges.

Nice! You found a solution for your problem!
( I didn’t realize before that your problem was surface brake-up )

The Object smooth recalibration in Maxwell, yeah, that’s why I make sure to export rather high resolution meshes, if the 60degree (or slightly higher) smooth doesn’t make it look smooth with the “Default” material, there is no point in using displacement since that only seem to increase the problem.

Hm, wonder if your solution works with all softwares that have the Maxwell export plugin? (I’m assuming that’s how you exported mxs from Maya?)

For some time now I’ve been thinking about getting a new modelling software like Maya, 3DSmax, Modo or similar since trueSpace that I use now isn’t developed any more (thanks Microsoft :evil: )… but it would have to be one that works well with Maxwell and ZBrush (since I love them :D)
Not sure if any of them are in my pricerange…a lot of softwares today have timelimited licenses and requirements for annual payments…