Attached Link: ZBrush Central files and thread here

Over at ZBrush Central there has been an interesting thread on importing ZBrush displacement maps into different renderers. Eric was good enough to post a message here some weeks back on how to do this for C with his updated version of Anything Grooves but I thought I'd recap for anyone that's interested, using the files from ZBrush Central. (I have quoted from Eric's original message but added in a few of my own settings specific to this example) 1. Import the base OBJ file. On the import object select Vertex Primitives and Create Single Polymesh. 2. Open the object in the Vertex Modeler. 3. Select Edit|Select All. 4. Select Selection|Smooth Edges. 5. On the Modeling tab in the Selection section, turn on Smooth and turn up the Subdivision Level to your CPU and memory limits (I used 4). 6. Apply Anything Grooves, set the U and V samples to 1 (so no new vertices are created). Other settings: Low: -0.5 High 1.25 but these may need to be adjusted to suit your map. If your subdivision is low turn on Smooth Angle to 10 or 20. 7. When you build the shader for the displacement,the map needs to be flipped vertically and the Levels adjusted in PS or similar (I used Auto-Levels) then import the displacement map to your shader, turn on Interpolate and set the Filtering on Summed Area Table or Gaussian Filter.

For comparison, here is the model without displacement mapping.

The up and coming thing in modeling from what I understand! Thank you!

Good tip. I wonders if it ran up memory space when rendering? I am bout to buy power pack.

Rendering isn't a problem - this took about a minute. It's the subdivision that takes the resources. The higher value you set, the better the detail but my system [AMD Athlon XP 1800, 736 Mb RAM] stalls with a memory allocation error if I set it to 5 for this model (1360 polys). I forgot to mention that you need to change the texture file for this example from 16 bit to 8 bit.

A min on a head is a real problem. Its supposed to take about 5 to 25 sec for this head. The displacement map is supposed to draw shadow on its map with the lights before the render. Anything grooves is polygons build up based texture map script, it benefits on some modeling projects not displacement map. Displacement map is only made for realistic detail inbetween the guided polygons. You could not have everything with displacement or trees in the scene with the head. I have realistic danielion plant 2+ million polygons with some transparent in shaders and Carrara barely can handle it. And it took me 45 min for a rendered frame. 3Ghz with 2GBRamBus Falcon will you please check Task Manager if it ran up memory when rendering and tell me how much it took. Anybody want eggs I cooked on my CPU?

I should have mentioned that the time I gave was for a render 1333x1000 pixels. Certainly there's 100% processor usage for 30 seconds or so and 75% memory usage. A small render is much as you suggest - less than ten seconds for an image the size I posted.

Waldo,

Grooves is not render time displacement, as you mentioned it's polygon based. It takes quite a bit of RAM to do this technique in Carrara using Grooves.

A 3Ghz with 2gig of RAM should be plenty to put a few of these on the screen. When the question first came up, I did all my experiments on a PIII-1ghz with 512meg. If you can avoid having the UI display the mesh, you can keep it reasonably responsive. By applying your shaders before applying Grooves and keeping your 3DView on bounding box, you can probably squeeze more objects and/or detail in scene.

Check out Ken Brilliant's DeeComposed image at http://www.brilliant-creations.com/deecomposed.htm for another example of the technique in Carrara. Scroll down a bit and he shows the control cage, smoothed mesh, and Grooves displaced final mesh.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Ken Brilliant is a member at ZBrush Central. The mesh and 'Displacement Map' is originally from ZBrush and he exported it into Carrara using 'Anything Groove' to bring the displacement map back on the mesh. Anything Grove only converted the displacement map into 'build up polygons' it gave the original mesh some additional polygons. So, the displacement map is useless in Carrara after the conversion. That is what I concepted this process.

I used ZBrush's alpha sometimes, it works the same as 'Anything Groove' for some of my models that need new peak points. I assume that I would get same number of vertices/polygons in Carrara if I used Anything Groove.

Eric just an idea to give.

Anything Grooves and Displacement Map plug in to control the scaling on either functions. It would help me make models more rapidly and save RAM in Carrara.

Message edited on: 06/23/2004 12:03

Waldo,

I don't have ZBrush so I can't really say how many polygons it would generate with its alpha. If you're using the suggested technique for rendering ZBrush objects, the level of subdivision in the VM controls the number of polygons. Grooves won't add any polygons, but might add vertices depending on your smoothing level.

I have thought about doing a rendertime displacement plug-in (like ZBrush), but currently don't have any solid plans to pursue it.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

You should pursue it but be sure to put Rendertime displacement and Anything Groove together to control number of polygons and quality of displacement detail.

I remember trying out that exercise a month ago with Carrara 3. But I could never get the mapping right. I gave up on that one because it had too many steps compared to other ZBrush exercises I've done with C3. www.shonner.com