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Hi,
I have been struggling with that for a while. The thing is that when you sculpt in zbrush, you subdivide the mesh many times, and then you go to the first level of subdivision of the mesh to create displacement and export that mesh at that first level back to maya.Right? The problem is that this mesh that you export is different from the original. I have attached an image so you can see the difference. As you can see,
the one imported from zbrush has been kind of smoothed out compare to the original. They say that this is normal because the polygons need some space,so when they are pushed by the displacement map, the final result will be exactly like in zbrush....well, I am not getting exactly the same result. yes, the displacement is done and all that, but it is not exactly the same. Specially in part of the mesh where i intentionally
put polygons near each other to create a hard edge. Because of this smoothing that zbrush create at the first level, all details are washed up, and I loos all the hard edges, etc...
I don´t now if you get what I am saying.
So any advice/techniques about that? Specific settings in zbrush when I am creating displacement?
Thanks


ps: uppss, I have no url to upload the image. Can´t I just attach it?

mmmm...I guess there isn´t much maxwell render user modeling human characters. Most renders I see are architecture interior or exteriors. So maybe you haven´t come across this problem.
I can´t find a way to work with displacement. It is frustrating, because I spent many hours modeling and detailing in zbrush, and now I can´t get it right. Also the mesh explodes in some parts of the body inexplicably, and I checked the displacement map and it is ok.
Anyyy way, I´ll keep trying
cheers

Does the model look right when you render it with mental ray? In order to post images, you can use a free hosting service such as imgur.com or tinypic.com. Could you show us some renders which exhibit the problem, and the corresponding images produced by mental ray?

Ok,
I getting the mesh exploding now using the default displacement values ( preteselated, no adaptative, and offset 0.5 wich is supossed to be the grey 50 %), .not sure why, I don´t know if it is the displacement map I extracted form zbrush. it looks fine to me. Any advice about the setting in zbrush before extracting map?
Also, in the file texture should I be playing with color balance? usually I set it up to 1 and -0.5. here I left it by default


this is how it looks in zbrush




I dind´t try it yet in mental ray. I´ll do some test later

now....where did mental ray go in maya 2013??? I can´t load it. In the pluging-manager, I don´t see it to load.
Did they move it somewhere else? Or change the name or something?

More tests.



Here is pretessellated method witch is not working at all, and on the fly that seems to be working, but not that great.
The first problem is that I had to guess the offset. The default 0.5 doesn´t work. I had to keep testing to get similar result as in zbrush.
The second problem is that even if the smoothing checkbox is activated. the mesh isn´t. Just look at the boobs and you´ll see that is all hard edges.
The third problem is that the method that seems to work better (on the fly) is extremely slow. I mean, I am a also a renderman user, and displacements takes literally 10 seconds.
That´s frustrating.anyway, what can I do? Pretesselated that is faster isn´t working (the mesh isn´t smoothed either),the offset is something that I had to keep guessing, and the mesh isn´t smoothed as it should.

ummm....I think pretessellated method is not reading the texture( I am using tiff), because I don´t see any details when mesh is displaced.
On the fly does it, but pretessellated seems to push the mesh without considering the texture.

okey, I am getting something here.
This is a comparison between a displace on the fly and the original detailed imported zbrush mush at highest level.



it is almost the same, but not exactly the same, because I had to guess the offset. So the original one is a bit bigger (you can only notice that if you put one image on top of the other). So it is a bit anoying having to import the high res mesh, and then start to play with the offset values to get it almost right.
Also, using displacement on the fly took 5 minutes to render that, when importing the high res mesh form zbrush took 1 minute.

mentalRay plug-in has moved to the end of the list in plug-in manager...

munch

I guess my maya 2013 is broken or something, because I don´t have it. Maybe when I imported prefs form 2012 during instalation something broke...never mind.