Dsiplacement Help - Lightwave Specific

Gordon_Robb · March 16, 2009, 12:33pm

Hi, I was wondering if someone could shed some light on the following for me.

What is the retationship between the following numbers.

‘Intensity’ in the Displacement subtool menue
‘Alpha Depth Factor’ in the Alpha menu
and the Multiply value applied in the Lightwave displacement node.

I find that this last number can vary from 16 down to .08 (these are some of my specifics), but can’t find any real explanation of how to get it right.

Can anyone explain these numbers, what they mean, and how to get my head round them?

Gordon_Robb · March 17, 2009, 1:44am

Anyone?

Gordon_Robb · March 17, 2009, 1:25pm

OK, can anyone point me towards where i might find the answer?

Gordon_Robb · March 19, 2009, 2:34am

So, is this post being missed, or does no one have an answer.

Can anyone even suggest how get the information from pixologic?

aurick · March 19, 2009, 6:28am

I’m not a LightWave user so I can’t tell you the final value. But here are the others:

Intensity tells ZBrush how strongly to render a displacement map if the map is being rendered on a model in ZBrush. It has no bearing on map generation.

ADF represents the depth variance in the map. If you’re going to render the map in ZBrush you would set Intensity to be equal to the map’s ADF. If you’re going to render the map in a different app, then the particular intensity setting that you use there will be derived from the ADF. So once you figure out the equation for your particular rendering engine you can plug the ADF into that equation to get the proper intensity to use.

If you use a 32-bit displacement map (assuming your renderer supports them) you don’t need ADF since the intensity settings are baked into the extra channel of the map.