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Hi,

First: sorry for my bad english... I have some displacement stepping problems in MAYA in my carved wood.
I built the displacement channel in 16 bit, but it has stepping. Precision is on 96 and smoothing is ON in the Maxwell Material. I even got the stepping with adaptive precision. The Poly plane where the material is assigned is enough subdivided. My texture is 7679 x 3164 and the endrender is 8500 x 4250px.
I converted it to 32 bit and blurred it many times in small steps. So I just loose details, but I have the same stepping problem. So I think it has to be a problem in Maya?! But I got the stepping even when I use the filtering in Maya... But for me it look like it does no really filter the image... Even with box or gaussian and a pre filter radius of 10 it looks very unblurred and still stepped...

Do anyone got a Idea?

Regards, Linus

Maya 2009, Maxwell Render V2, Mac Pro 2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 16 GB Ram, OSX 10.5.8

Maxwell does not support texture prefiltering, so using those controls won't help. The plug-in can't really influence the result, but to make sure you could try setting up displacement with the same texture in Studio, to see if there's any difference. Posting an image or a test scene should also help us understand the problem better.

I'm moving this to the main Maxwell forum, as I don't think it's plug-in related, so there's a better chance somebody over there will have a solution for you.

Open the mxs in Studio, and for the displacement texture, in the texture picker, turn Interpolation on. Maybe that fixes the problem. Post a render if you can.

The Maya plug-in uses the "filter type" attribute from the texture node to control interpolation. Anything below "quadratic" translates to interpolation off, "quadratic" and above result in interpolation being turned on. The default value for that attribute is "quadratic", so the displacement texture already has interpolation unless Pixelprinz changed it.

Thanks Mihnea Balta and Mihai.

I did some more tests, but Interpolation was also not the solution.
If I add noise in PS (add noise 1) and reduce the noise 90%, so I can hide the stairstepping a little bit, but so the surface gets to bumpy and I need a very flat surface...

Here some tests:

Could you send me the displacement texture or share a portion of it? Because, I think it does not have the required accuracy. Actually, it looks like converted from 8 bit.

Hi Tom, thanks, but the texture is built up in 16bit. Here you can download it: http://www.pixelprinz.ch/docroot/pics/T ... pl.tif.zip

I think your map is fine and here it renders as expected.



Please try this:
Save your MXM or scene through Maya and open it in Studio to see if texture interpolation is really active or not.

I can confirm there is a bug in the osx version of Maxwell, it's clipping internally that texture to 8 bit of precision and hence the results you are getting. It will be solved for the next patch.

Best regards

nachob

Great, thank you very much! Regards, Linus

Fixed in 2.01