It's not very often that I am asking tech questions here in the poser forum. I am new to Poser5's material room. I did my first experiments. Now I wanted to combine an image map (photographic rough stonetexture) with a simple B&W image as displacement map. It works so far, but the texture gets stredged and I can't find out how to fix it, if possible at all. here is pic showing the problem:

... and here is a pic how I set up the material, not much complicated. Does this feature only work with small displacement values ? Did I miss something ??

The edge of the displaceent map (the black/white border) is probably not as clean or crisp as you would like it to be for a completely clean edge to your object. You need to clean it up in Photoshop/Gimp/editor of choice.

JonTheCelt

What you are seeing is the edges of the pixels of your displacement map.  If the resolution of the map is high enough, you can smooth the edges in your paint program.  That may help.  Also, this is one instance where texture filtering (render options) can make a difference.

Hope this helps.

John

Hi All, thank you for your quick answer, but I think this is not the problem. I created another image with sharp vertical and horizontal lines, but the problem persists. the edge pixels are extruded and repeated along the path, and show these stripes. texture filtering makes it only a bit smoother. see next pic:

Ah, I thought you meant the roughness of the actual edges of the displacement, not the banding on the side.

Sadly, thre's nothing that can be done about that... if you think about your UV map which the textures are being mapped onto, it doesn't have any allowance for those side pieces, since they're not actually geometry. So the colour texture map is sread right along the 'extruded' area of the displacement.

This also occurs at low levels of displacement, by the way, but it's just not so obvious because of the smaller areas of surface being distorted.

JonTheCelt

Hi Jon, thank you for the answer. yes - it's the same thing like a wrong oriented UV-map. sad thing :( BTW - I did some experiments with interesting results. one of these I'd like to share - LOL (I plugged the original imagemap into the U- and V-Scale of the displacement map - with interesting result): just "abstract art" :)

I'd like to see a post of your displacement maps for these examples.  I have a feeling that your problem is with them, rather than the render settings or anything else.

To avoid the stretching effect, you'll need to modify the UV map.
This is going to be very tricky, but not impossible.

Hi Sam, here is the displacement map I used for the latest two postings - nothing special with it. (just created on the fly for some tests) for the last (artificial) pic I used Poser's built-in granite (3D texture) to see if it makes a difference .

... and here ist the pentagram.

Hard to tell here but from my own experience, if there are any compression artefacts in the image - even if you can't see them - Poser will throw a fit.  This becomes more noticable at higher displacement values.  The stepped edges of the pentagram definitely don't help; you need to smooth all that stuff out.

Because you have such a sharp contrast between the black and the white you are seeing single pixels stretched over the side of thge relief. if you blurred the edge so as to achive a slope the banding might be less obvious., but you might need so long a slope it completely changes the shape of the item and defeats the object of the exercise.

I do'nt understand what the problem is?

Is it the roughness in the side of pentagrams extrusion?

If so:

A.)  I can see in roughness in edges the B/W DIssplacement Map.  BTW what resolution are the two maps you're using...

B.) What the Maximum Texture Size is set to, in your Render Settings.  This happened to me for the longest time, even after I'd switched to 4048 x 4048 pixels textures.  Thank goodness Ockham reminded me of the Max. Texture SIze setting, and low and behold I must have bumped it, becasue it was set at 1024!

=  )