HI, Im a maya user new to zbrush and i want5ed toask, is it beter to use displacement and cavity maps or normal maps ?
does one give more detail and better result when used in maya? :rolleyes:
Thanks
It depends what you are going to use it for…I would suggest to learn both methods. From what I know, games use normal maps, and displacement is probably for movies and high res applications. I might be wrong…I heard better results with detail in displacements. hopefully that helps
Displacement really changes the height of the polys during rendering, so f.i. you see this especially in the ground-shadow-outline or in a close-up or from a side-view-angle.
It takes the longest render-time of both methods, so it’s on ‘normal’ pc’s mostly used for high-quality-stills
Normal-Mapping is a kind of enhanced bump-mapping.
The polygon-heights are not really altered, but it renders much faster than displacement with acceptable quality and is therefore a good compromise for animation.
Best results are given when you use both in conjunction within one shader.
Hey rasta, why would using both give better results? I mean, I thought displacementmaps did everything normalmaps did, plus the heightstuff…
Also, when we are on the subject of textures, there´s something I´ve been wondering about that I hope someone can answer:
Why is it so important to have textures in 1024, 2048, 4096 etc resolutions… Yes, they can be divided by 2 all the way down to 1, but is that really so important? The only thing I can think of is that it would be easier for a computer to scale it (though Im not sure on that, it´s just something I thought of my self)…
For example, my model I´m working on has 1.3m points, which means that a 1024x1024 map would be too small, and a 2048x2048 would be extreme overkill… So what would happen if I took a value like 1536x1536 (which is dividable by a power of 2 all the way down to 3)… Would the texture be all messed up when I imported it to another program?
Probably by the time this has been moderated and posted there will be 10 replies, still here we go…
Well you would probably use displacement mapping to create a mid-resolution model, and use bump/normal mapping to create the very fine detail. That way your renderer doesn’t have to choke on a multi-million poly mesh to add the very finest detail. That way you get the spped and efficency of both worlds.
Simon
Hello, the difference between normal and displacement?
If you render a 16bit map for displacement it’s 16 bits = 65,536 tint grayscale map. For the diplacement 32bit you have 32 bits = 4,294,967,296 tint grayscale. Now the result if you use a 16 bit displacement map you need one bump or one normal map to adding the high frequencies details.
BUT if you use a 32 bit map displacement you don’t need a high frequencies map because a 32bit map in grayscale “with” enough of information. But if you wan’t more details it is possible.
Hope this is helpfull for you.
Emmanuel.
PS : I know i have not speacking about normal map information>>>> it is a texture which takes the co-ordinates of lights contraiment has a map bump.