I was working on a character with fur (he will not be sold, so please don't move this to Product Showcase), and I decided to try a displacement map. It actually came out better than I expected. (He needs some work on the ears still, but...) But the displacement fur does have sort of hard looking edges. Softening the map helped a little, but not enough. Are there any tricks to soften up the fur to avoid that "sculpted" look out of the renderer? Or will I just have to fluffy him up in postwork?

Thankies for the help!

Can't tell for shure in Poser (yet) but displacement maps work with contrast between (greyscale) black and white. So I'd try to lower the contrast. If you have Photoshop, try perhaps the highpass filter. I also get the impression that the head and the body d-maps are at a different scale. I had this on an item bought at Daz' and goit a reply that normally the head/body should be set at a scale of some three as the body is usually about three times lager. Not in UV map, but in size, and the size of the uvmaps is what causes this problem.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1740708

The problem may be that with a standard greyscale map, there are only 8 bit of displacement information, that are only 256 different levels. That can be overcome with 16 bit displacement maps, but poser can not read 16 bit images directly. But there is a little trick with Photoshop and math nodes. The link shows you the necessary steps; sorry I have not yet found the time to write a proper tutorial. The original post was about z-brush generated maps, but it should be work for 16 bit maps generated in Photoshop as well.

Thanks Quinlor for mentioning this thread!!!!! It will become very helpful and I printed it out.

Aeneas, here are samples from the neck area of my bump maps (they show it nicer to the disp maps). Unfortunately, not only are the maps different scales, but the neck area is really squished on the body map. In order to match them better I'd have to either make the body map huge, increase the scale of the fur on the head, or dink with it forever, This area is going to be covered with a bodysuit in what I have planned, I decided to get it as good as I could and move on. Thanks for pointing it out, though; I had been concentrating on it more in the shoulder area and hadn't noticed how big the difference was at the front of the neck.

Quinlor, thanks for the link. It helped a little, but not as much as I had hoped. What I want may not be possible, since displacements maps can only go normal to the surface.

Try Eye Candy fur filter in postwork.

That can be overcome with 16 bit displacement maps, but poser can not read 16 bit images directly What images did you try? I can use 16 bit TIFF files (made in photoshop) in Poser 5 without any problems.

Hi stewer! You are right, Poser can read them. But it seems that the output of the image node is only 8 bit anyway. When I put my 16 bit TIFF directly into poser, I got the result shown in the first Pic at the link, the same as with a 8 bit version of the same map. With the described method I got the much better result in the second Pic.