This is a very basic scene file to familiarize Daz Studio users with Displacement Maps. Displacement Maps affect the geometry of the mesh during the rendering of the scene, much like Bryce and other landscape programs have Terrains where the image driving the Terrain works by a bright pixel value equating to a high point in the Terrain mesh, and a dim pixel value equating to a low point in the Terrain mesh, Displacement maps will do the same. Where they differ is the Displacement Map will not work its magic until you render, and most impotantly, they do not increase the poly count of the mesh they are applied on. Bottom line; your mesh will remain the same number of polygons, but the Displacement Map will add in a lot of detail to the mesh, making it look as if it had a very high amont of polys.

Also what's great about Daz Studio is that it fully supports 16-bit (grayscale) images as Displacement Maps. What does this mean? If you have an image on your computer that is NO color other than various levels of gray, it is refered to as "Grayscale" and is normally 8-bit. 8-bit just means that the image can only contain a maximum of 256 levels of gray, which, believe it or not is VERY limiting in 3D. 16-bit grayscale images on the other hand, have 65,535 levels of gray in them! This makes for extremely smooth and detailed images for affecting Displacement. The usual file format used for 16-bit grayscale images in 3D programs are .tif's. Bmp, jpg, gif, and most others are not capable of containg 16-bit grayscale. As of right now, Poser does not support 16-bit grayscale images, it downsamples them to 8-bit, making the mesh look of low quality. There is a work-around for Poser for this, yet it still doesn't match the quality of a true 16-bit Displacement.

Attached Link: DOWNLOAD (2.3Mb)

Here's the cube fully rendered with all the maps. This Daz Studio scene file consists of a Bump Map and a Displacement Map in 16-bit grayscale, and a Diffuse (Color) Map in 48-bit color. All maps are seamless/tilable and line up with one another. The maps are placed on a simple cube. The scene was created in Daz Studio version 0.9.22.1, and rendered with the 3Delight engine. Just load and render. The maps were originally created in Photoshop CS. Enjoy, and experiment. :oD

I unziiped the file then try and open the scean. For some reason it askes me for files it can't find then crashes. I'm using the same version if DS. Maybe I'm doing someting wrong?

Hi, AgentSmith! Great tutorial, btw :D. I'm getting an error, too. It's looking for a file on the E drive, brick1_diff_1.tiff. When I tell it to stop asking, nothing loads. MS

You will find in your content folder of Daz Studio another folder called data. When you save a scene there are some files generated in this folder. As I could read in my log file all the needed missing file are in a folder called box. If you want to share them we would have to copy this box folder to our Daz Studio data folder.

Import the box.obj file, save it as a .daz scene and that should generate the needed .dso file in the Data folder (I haven't actually tried yet). Edit: yes, importing the box and saving as a scene file lets the supplied .daz file open (you have to find the .tiff still).

Message edited on: 06/09/2005 14:29

Attached Link: Same link, new zip file

What a annoyance, lol. Sorry about that folks, never even knew about that. I have re-zipped the file(s) to now include a set of folders to drag and drop into your Program Files folder that includes the dso/uv files needed for this download to (hopefully) work for ya. Thanks. If this doesn't work, just scream. AS

Well...as I look at the scene file in notepad...it looks like I'm going to HAVE to do this Poser style, and create everything INSIDE the Studio program file folder..... Always hated that about Poser... I'll re-post again, after I have it fixed. AS

I downloaded the new zip file and have copy the box folder into my data folder. It works except that you will have to find the image file when prompted!