So, I have a character that relies heavily on displacement mapping... A few of them actually. When rendered in 'normal' Poser lighting, they come out just fine. When rendered in IBL, the displacement strength renders basically doubled, causing the figures to look puffy. As any one encountered this before? Is there a fix? A work around other than completel disabling displacement?

What version of Poser are you using? If P11, what render engine are you using? (Firefly or Superfly?)

I use both P11 and PPP2014. Firefly in Both

Ok ... does this occur in both versions of Poser?

Yes. A little less severe in PP2014, but still evident. I can provide my settings and post examples when I get home/early tomorrow morning. Gotta love 2nd shift....

Please do ... I may not have your answer, but I'm sure someone here does, I just want you to have all your info up so we can work this out for you.

Asolutely. As soon as i'm at my home machine, I'll get some screen shots

Above are my render settings in P11 and PP2014 repectively.

As an update, trying to rerplicate the issue... it appears to happen only when the character is in shadow.....

Can you replicate it? what happens if you throw the displacement map on a highres poser sphere, does it do the same?

I'm trying to duplicate the issue now. Its frustrating. I assumed it was a problem of the lighting, but it may be something specific to the scene I was rendering

Nobody's yet asked but do you use SnarlyGribbly's Scene Fixer script? Even though I note you have GC on, some things may not be set correctly. The script takes care of everything. Also, why are your Min displacement bounds set to zero? They should be 1, at least.

Well. I can't replicate the error. Loaded the same scene, same figures and same light, and it renders fine. Absolutely no changes were made in the settings...

SamTherapy posted at 11:18AM Thu, 23 August 2018 - #4335241

Nobody's yet asked but do you use SnarlyGribbly's Scene Fixer script? Even though I note you have GC on, some things may not be set correctly. The script takes care of everything. Also, why are your Min displacement bounds set to zero? They should be 1, at least.

Honestly, I've never messed with that setting that I can remember. I'll change it

You only need to adjust Min Displacement Bounds when the renderer is unable to guess what value to use. The way it works is that when doing ray intersections, the renderer is trying to optimize by skipping objects that are so far away there is no way that a displacement could cause an intersection. In certain rare situations, the shader can be doing something tricky that results in larger displacement than is directly evidenced by the root node displacement parameter value. In such cases, you can see mysterious gaps in some polygons as if the renderer didn't "see" the moved pixels due to displacement.

If you're not seeing gaps in the mesh caused by excessive displacement beyond the amount the renderer was guessing it would find, then you do not have to set this, ever.

Conversely, setting this when you don't need to does in fact slow your render down. So if you ARE setting it, it has to be for a good reason, otherwise you're canceling the optimization that the renderer is trying to use. The value overrides whatever the renderer thinks is best, and instead tells it "try harder to find intersections this far away even if you know that isn't going to happen". Like so many advanced settings, the value not only does some good occasionally, but also does some serious harm. Don't change things unless you know exactly why you're doing it.

Ah, thank you, Sensei.