There we go, the GUV version is a lot more friendly to Vray. Still a minor inconsistency along the edge in both 2d & 3d modes, but probably still good enough based on what I have to work with at the moment. Will be interesting ot see how well Vray 1.5 does when it comes out. From what I’ve read it sounds like the displacement part of it got a complete overhaul. Also will be interesting to see what everyone else posts over the next few days. Thanks for posting these and the fun thread Pixolator. 
Maya6 mentalRay, non GUV version
Hi!!!there
13 sec. FinalRender Stage-1
http://members.cox.net/plummet/Sword
SubDivision 50, Height 5, Depth 5, edge Lenth 50.
still got work to do but 34 min. is a bit much from leishens previous post
same as before but 3 iterations on mesh and 7 depth and hight
35sec.
leishen: Looks like your settings may need a bit of tweaking. From the looks of it your only getting positive displacement going on. Try loading the bitmap into the material editor (get map button > bitmap) and apply -0.5 as the RGB Offset.
Everyone: Hey now, no hiding the toughest part of the render (the blade). That’s cheating.
Vray, GUV… I used these displacement values (2.24, -1.12)
The Turtle Renderer representing…
Cinema 4D 8.5.
http://homepage.mac.com/creed_nmd/.Pictures/Pixolator/sword_output
Image shows the first (harder) version of the map, with both versions of the object.
Settings as follows:
http://homepage.mac.com/creed_nmd/.Pictures/Pixolator/sword_settings
Because C4D reads mid grey in the displacement map as 0, we need two versions of the map: the one supplied, and an inverted version done in Photoshop.
These are loaded into 2 materials, and the Filter shader used to clip the used portion of each map to the appropriate ‘half’ of the data (the 50-100% clip).
Both maps are inverted vertically (the -1 Tiles in the Mapping dialog), and the Mix Textures set on both to ensure they both mix with the base material (which doesn’t have Mix Textures on…)
The model is dropped into a HyperNurbs object, set to 6 subdivisions for the final render.
The displacement Materials also have Alias 1 Sampling, and -100% blur (because this is a still–for a movie this should be SAT (or MIP) and 0%).
The Displacement height is set to 8.58 (30 x quoted Alpha gain of 0.286) and 100%; the +ve map is set at positive 100%, the negative at -100%.
Other than having to invert the map (black to white), create 2 materials and clip both to the top 50%, and flip the mapping vertically, they work pretty well ‘out-of-the-box’.
This is my try with the sword in Lightwave, using the GUVTiles version:
As requested, here’s a zip containing the LW scene file, the base model and tiny version of the map, this will hopefully get some of you wavers up to speed 
Important Note- Use the large displacement map from Pixolator’s download, instead of the lo-res one in my zip. That’s there just as an example. First though in photoshop or similar, adjust the levels of the map to something like [0, 0.25, 210], convert to 8 bit and flip vertically and save it out.
Then you should be able to match my render above. If anyone has any tweaks or developments it’ll be great to see them. cheers 
Grub, thanks for the example! Instead of reducing to 8 bit I converted to .hdr in hdrshop. Seems to work well.
to Zeddicus :
Thank you for your instruction!
test LW7.5 
guv map
Pilou >> pour animator fais:
Build > convert subdivided.
afin de lisser ton modele, avec le bump map tu obtiens un resultat meilleur.
Here is my entry:
I used the effort pioneered by Creed for
Cinema4D but added the following different settings:
Using Pixolator’s Zsword file with GUV tile displacement map.
Lighting: Default Single Light, Raytrace render, NO GLOBAL ILLUMINATION.
For +VE:
Alias 1 Sampling
Blur Offset 25%
Blur Scale 5%
Contrast 15%
All other settings same as Creed
For -VE:
Alias 1 Sampling
Blur Offset 25%
Blur Scale 5%
Contrast -15%
I believe the opposite contrast values for appropiate displacement image is giving more pleasing detailed results.
Hey Jotajota, is that actually displacing geometry, because it only looks like it’s a bump map.
Looking sweet Continuumx, thanks for posting!
Pilou with each soft we must do the smooth by subdise before apply the Displacement map.
Hum hum : normal smooth and subdivise are not exactly the same
In the first number of facettes don’t move, in second yes !
And displacement don’t add facettes but just move it !
Am I wrong ? That’s yet a little mysterious for me
Pilou
yes… and no… but wrong anyway, for the both you must smooth.