I'm playing around with creating vascular displacement maps so that they can be used in conjunction with any texture and bump map. The map background is grey (grey scale 126)the veins are added to this increasing to black at the high points. It seems that Firefly is treating the polygon edges as being a darker color than the faces. Is there a way around this? In the the image I have turned up displacement strength to 0.3 so that the problem is easier to see.

Poser 5 SR3

Thanks for any input, I'm stumped.

I am not sure I understand your problem, but there is already something wrong with your displacement map : Poser 5 considers that black = 0 displacement, whereas white = max displacement. So, if you apply a grey map, it will displace the whole geometry. To achieve the effect you want, you'd need a large black map with the veins drawn in white. This may be a cause of your problem perhaps ? Hope this is of some help.

I made a negative image of the displacement map but the results seems to indicate that Poser treats Black as the highest point for displacement maps. I've got displacement set to +0.3. Still the same problem though, the ploygon edges seem to be treated as displacements while the color in the map is uniform.

You might consider setting up the figure with the displacement bound on the fingers and hands set to 0. This effectively turns off displacement for those pieces which look in this image to be the only things really effected adversely. A setting like that could be saved into a P5 mat/mor pose file and distributed as such. Just a though there...

er... also turn off that on the neck too.. just noticed that... displacement can be handy, but a pain to play with and get tweaked just right. The results are worth it though.

My problem is the lines showing up on the torso and legs they are not from my map. They seem to be comming from the mesh. I don't plan on using displacement set as high as in these images, I just turned it up to make the lines show up more. I also am creating displacment maps for the head as well so they will all be displaced by the same amount. Is this normal for displacment mapping?

Well... this may sound strange, but I only use my own Sixus1 figures in my work (with the exception of a few props from people I know personally) and have done with them what it looks like you're trying here with no problem. Being that it's happening on a figure I've never attempted that with, I'm not sure what else to try.

It's funny, I started on this project and then broke my right arm. I wasn't able to draw again until lately. In between I upgraded my computer to an athlon 2500, and 1 gig of memory. I have reinstalled windows 2000 and Poser 5 + Service Release 3. I don't rember having this problem before but I may have not done to many close ups as I was just playing with the idea. Maybe there is something in my new setup that's causing it? I haven't noticed any iregularities in any of my other graphics programs.

I reinstalled Poser just in case, still have the same problem.

After experimenting, the answer seems to be an almost white map with very dark veins and displacment turned down low. This a conversion of an earlier bump map I did a long time ago. Sorry I forgot to turn of gentitals.

that's a great looking vein map. Love esther

As compiler mentioned displacement maps use black for no displacement and white for max displacement when concerning the mesh. But there's a bug in Poser 5 that concerning shadows it works the other way round. So at the time beeing displacement maps are unfortunately totally broken und you should use bump maps instead. Hope this gets fixed in SR4!!!! Looks great anyway! :-)

P.S.: Depending on the light it is possible to get the right look. But change the lights and it looks wrong - because it is.

Thanks for the input about the displacement mapping. I finally shelved the idea of using displacement maps for veins and have gone back to bump maps. It's a shame though becuase in an animation the effect of the bump map can sometimes disappear as the figure moves depending on the angle of the camera and the figure. Oh well, maybe SR4.