Displacement_Map_Render
 

I am getting a strange result when applying a displacement map made in Mudbox to an object in Maya. All the sides of the object
pop off. Please see 3 pics attached. Any ideas would be great, I am a newbie, thanks.

Brandon C.

Hi Bcurless

displacement maps are always a bit of an entity in themselves but the other issue people always seem to forget about is the actual geometry itself that the map is being applied to.

I'm sure you dont need telling this but firstly check that all the geometry is intact and the edges/verts are all merged together as expected.

But secondly and very importantly, is to make sure the mesh is updated with the one you did your sculpt on, and also make sure you have one or two levels of subdivision to support the displacement map itself. People always seem to forget about the geometry update. You are sculpting and changing the geometry so its important that it gets updated in maya too. So export a level one or level 2 subdivision from mudbox. At the moment the base mesh has nothing to support the displacement. Gone are the days where we worry about poly count as much, obviously how many polys is always down to how good hardware is but for the most part, one or two divisions up from the base mesh will not hurt.

Also with regards to the map is it a 32bit?

hope this helps

Jay

Displacement_Map_Render
 

Hi Jay sorry for late reply. I usually get an email when someone replies, but not this time for some reason. Thanks for your advice! It holds together a lot better when I import the geo from Mudbox! Here is a pic I rendered with Mental Ray. It's I think a little blurry and something is still kinda funky with the edges though. I probably need to learn more about the M.R. Approximation Editor. If you have any further advice let me know please. Thanks again! This was causing me a huge frustration!

Brandon C.

Hey Brandon i did a tut on the MR approx editor a few years back might help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1hWksl8GB0

I take it your disp map is set to raw and not srgb? easy thing to forget!

Yeah its worth checking out the MR tute that David has posted here too

Jay

Sorry for late reply again. Thank you David for the MR video link! Still not sure
about how to set disp map to raw and not srgb. I'll have to do some research on it. Thanks again!

Brandon C.

why do you need raw?

If you are looking for extra detail from the sculpt, just export the map as a 32bt exr float. You wont get any better. Its a case of tweaking settings after that

He's looking for the color correction in mental ray I should think mate.

@Brandon it's under the file attributes (of the texture) in the attribute editor -> color space.

Needs to be set to raw to take advantage of the 32 bit map as it will have been saved out without correction you don't want MR adding gamma to your displacement or your bump / normal. if you saved out a 16 / 32 bit image. The correction upsets the black white balance on the image hence the need to turn it off.

Color correction in Maya is now on by default so it will gamma correct 16 / 32 bit images by default. Used to be to the other way round. If your using a version below 2014 or maybe 2015 i forget then you won't need to do it you'll just run in to the problem in reverse.

Dave :)