I know it is a fairly common question but what is the setting that has to be used when rendering displacement in P5? That is without mesh breaks and nasty black spots. Thanks

Make sure your render options displacement bounds is 0.001 higher than the maximum displacement value used. Theoretically, you can use any displacement value, depending on the effect you are trying to achieve.

So, if the displacement it .05 then the minimum discplacement bounds should be .051 .. Just making sure that is right but it seems to be working better this time.

Yep, that's right.

I don't have P5 to hand on this machine, but aren't there two places to set this -- a global setting in Render Options and a per-component setting in the properties window?
(Edoted to cirrect tuping errir)

Message edited on: 02/19/2005 10:01

That's correct.

For example, as mentioned previously:

In the Material Room, set your object's displacement to whatever value you want to use (say, 0.5)

In Render Options, set Minimum Displacement bounds to 0.501.

Message edited on: 02/19/2005 10:12

Message edited on: 02/19/2005 10:13

I may be wrong about this, but I don't think you have to be that exact. AFAIK, as long as the Minimum Displacement bounds is greater than the maximum displacement you've used in any of your material shaders, then you should be OK. (I regularly use displacements varying from (eg) 0.1 -> 0.8 in different materials; then set the Min. Disp to 1.0 and it seems to work.) The only other thing to be careful about is where different surfaces meet .. and that can get tricky. Best bet is to ensure that there's NO displacement along the joins, especially if the surfaces are at angles to each other.. Cheers, Diolma

"I may be wrong about this, but I don't think you have to be that exact." You're absolutely right but why waste numbers? :)

Ghost..bare in mind if your map is coming from Z-brush P5 doesn't read it like other apps,you'll need to use a math node to get any kind of inversion of the mesh happening. check out the settings on the 'hellcolumn2' for z-brsuh maps in P5 also before exporting your map from z-brush you should hit 'check uv's' then 'fix seams'..this should fix any nasty edging Cheers Stefan

Wish I could be using one from ZBrush stonemason but I still can't get anything from that with the overlapping UVs .. I still have to try the elemental one of these days.

ahh that's right,forgot about that..bloody macs eh ;)

Naw .. Just silly UV Mapper's ;)

LOL Sam! The only reason I "waste numbers" is 'cos I work on scenes piecemeal. I start a new scene, create a texture for a prop or whatnot, then save the mat in the library. I do this so as to speed up render time when I'm faffing about experimenting. Then I open the scene I'm trying to create, import the prop and apply the material. Used to be that I'd spend AGES wondering why the displacement didn't work in the proper scene, when it worked OK when I was developing it, only to (finally!) remember that I'd used a different max during the developement. So now I use bigger numbers to leave headroom..:-)) Cheers, Diolma