I followed a tutorial and got these results: This is what I would expect, 
I imagine someone has experienced this before, any help would be useful. BTW the tutorial I was following was Scott Spencer’s, which was very well done. Any ideas or leads would be greatfully appreciated.
just quickly messing with the alpha gain and alpha offset. reduced both to zero and made the model basically smooth. obviously there needs to be alpha gain and aloha offset values, but would they perhaps be different in maya 2008. I’m a complete newbie to this stuff.
what program are you rendering in?
maya 2008
Maya settings for mental ray In the Attribute Editor under File Attributes for the file texture node set Filter Type to Mipmap Turn off Feature Displacement in the lowpoly models' shape node Under the mentalraySubdivApprox node in the attribute editor select Spatial for the Approx Method, set the Min Subdivions to 3 and the Max Subdivisions to 5 Set Length to 0.010 (a length of 0.10 will work as well) Render!
author: was Dues Ex,
this quote is from a thread that helped me a lot! i had forgotten about the SubdivApprox node! try this and see if it helps.
In case you didnt know; the mentalraySubdivApprox menu can be found under windows>rendering editors>mentalRay…and you ll see what he is talking about.
GL!
Sandman
Hey I appreciate the tip, I tried the things you suggested and am still getting a bloated, balloony looking thing.
how are you going about it?
I’m getting ready to head out to church. I’ll explain aftet in detail. But if you have seen Scott Spencer’s Gnomonoly Tutorial. I followed his tutorial to a T. Even RE-doing everything about 7-8 times. Its prettty specific, and precise instructions. I also followed another tutorial with no like.
Well I’ve given the prolem the good ol’ college try. I’m an artist not a tech artist. I’ll wait until someonecomes up with a soltuion to create a displacement map creation technique that works in Maya 2008. If I do figure something out. I’ll certainly post it.
hmm k. guess that works
Autodesk put in a new feature, for unknown reasons still, in the preferences of maya 2008 that needs to be turned On for 32bit dispmaps from zb to work correctly.
Window > Settings/Preferences > Settings > Rendering > Mentalray preferences > use maya-style alpha detection in file textures.
i had issues of both no detail, and heavy bloating…now its gone and the stuff works like its supposed to
Cheers
T
I was having the exact same problem this Fixed it thanks