ZBrushCentral

Revolution!

Community
#1

We all know about the main limitation of Displacement maps. They cannot depict ‘overhangs’. So the use is limited to a ‘base’ structure and if complex detail would have to be applied, then that is possible only by high density ‘real’ meshes. Till now…

Ben Rogal wrote a multi directional vector displacement ‘shader’ for XSI.

http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=29;action=display;threadid=28834;start=0

Faker has created the following Image (in the thread) using this technique and a great ZBrush Head showing unprecedented flexibility in detail. THIS IS AMAZING! From a sphere…

[attach=48685]Vector_Displacment_test.jpg[/attach]
(Thanks Faker!)

This opens a complete new dimension!

There goes the weekend :lol:
Lemo

PS: Dear higher beings working on ZB2.5… PLEASE include a vector displacement map calculation besides the scalar displacement map… It is so simple compared to the scalar one. Please with a cherry on top!

Attachments

Vector_Displacment_test.jpg

#2

WOW !!
Now thats impressive, wonder when other applications will integrate this ;]

#3

It’s not difficult to transport to anything running Mental Ray. So Max and Maya could use that fairly easily as I understand. It’s more of a Mental Ray thing than core XSI. This method truly makes regular (scalar) displacement maps look like bump maps by comparison. Just check out the cavity of the eye lids on fakers head model. Simply amazing. And remember… the base mesh is a simple sphere.
Funny, a scene with a bunch of spheres and when you render it it becomes a completely and truly unexpected scenery…
Lemo

PS:I can’t picture which other app you are refering to ;>

#4

Render times?

#5

I found regular displacement render times to be a good rule of thumb. But I am only playing with it since yesterday. A limit for me is that I cannot get the large meshes out of ZBrush. Tops is 1 Mio. Then ZBrush dies of memory starvation while exporting high subd levels. I’m still fiddling with that. I imported a 7.5 Mio mesh from another app into XSI’s giga polygon core without problems. But that took a couple of minutes. Calculating the maps was rather straight forward then.
There is a demo version which would enable you to try that out yourself.
Cheers
Lemo

#6

Yes, the issue is getting the high res object out of ZBrush. I understand that this is improved in 2.5 (and maybe already in the Mac version?). Also it takes a fair amount of RAM to deal with very high poly meshes. The ideal solution would be for our Pixologic friends to offer an output option of a surface position (or vector displacement) map. I realize this probably isn’t the best time to request a feature, but this type of output would actually be much simpler technically than all of the great displacement and normal map options that ZBrush already gives us.

#7

Probably a good idea for a plugin. That would raise the bar from ‘Detail’ to ‘crazy Detail!’.
Lemo

PS:Huh? Moved to Community? Fakers Model is a ZBrush mesh… Only the render is XSI.

#8

Hahaha, well actually this has been doable for years under REYES renderers like Renderman and 3Delight. Math is so cool! Nice to see though. :wink:

#9

I played with 3Delight which is free for personal use. But the effort to transport scenes is prohibitive for just ‘playing’ with it. XSI has this interface for it. But I don’t have MR fully subdued. So I’m not even going there 8).
Lemo

#10

Hahaha, really that hard huh, hahaha. Well a few years back my business partner of the time and I wrote th RIB exporter for our app of choice for 3Delight. Took us a month, we were helping with early development at the time for 3Delight in real world production pipelines. These days under Maya I use Liquid and export to Pixie. I see no difference, other than the immense control I have over Maya/MR or XSI/MR, but I work on some pretty advanced stuff and pipeline efficiencies. XSI is so backwards on rendering to multiple machines with MR, it made several of us laugh uncontrollably. However I’m old school REYES render jockey, and so many processes exist nowadays that never did way back when. :wink:

#11

Yup, seems that XSI/MR is not really a great app when you need a lot of licenses. But there is a cool renderfarm management prog out there from binaryalchemy.de which is supposedly pretty good. I don’t herd cpu’s yet for rendering so I am not in the know there. I only deal with weapons of mass storage and computing in the financial area. Same bleeding edge stuff, just that the software is not funny at all. I try to get out there to have a change of scenery… But I try not to get to far away from high speed, mission critical, multi processor systems used in conjunction with storage arrays, fibre switches and all that good stuff… Exciting. ZBrush ‘unlimited’ could run on that system 8). Subd level 4096… And counting haha.
L