Displacement
 

You may find this question a bit silly, but I want to ask;

Do I have to have a high polycount model to use a displacement map?

Or is it possible to use it "straight" on a "simple" nurbs-surface or polygon mesh?

Hey Undseth, discplacement will depend on the number of polys you are using. so yes, high poly count more detail.

Ah ok. Thats too bad. It's not easy getting a good displacement without having a really dense poly mesh.

Thanks roach!

I wouldn't underline this. Afaik displacement mainly depends on tessellation and displacement settings of the poly object. To get good results from a single poly plane you'd need to up these values quite a bit. Imho Maya's displacement implementation sucks. Slow as heck...

Here's some proof :)

This is a single poly plane displaced with a fractal texture. The result isn't even what I expected... ewww...

Yay, I found out something!

After connecting the height field to the shader group (if I remember correctly), I check this setting in the objects attribute editor.

"Feature displacement"

This way, you can create a displacement on a single polygon. And the result is fantastic!

Ooops, seems like Kbrown already said so.... :)

Btw, the manual "states" that the extra sample rate should be set lower than the initial sample rate.