[Jakakadave]

I'm having trouble with a displacement/decal i am trying to use, it looks rubbish!



Below is what I want it to look like. I didn't do this render, which i think was done in mental ray, but I have the PSD he used to make his maps but just cant seem to get good results. I'm using crazybump to make my maps.

In particular I want to have the background, stippled effect, flat, like in the reference image, with the horses displacement more prominent and 3D than i have managed to achieve..

I'm saving out of photoshop and crazybump as PNG files.

Here's a pic of my displacement map...



If I simply increase the displacement height and add some offset as shown below, it pushes everything out further, but looks wierd, the horse become kinda skeletal, with the bits highlighted in the disp map being really sharp.



I want to keep the background flat and the horses raised but smooth looking.

I'm getting close to the end of my tether on this one. Please help!

[Hervé]

your sip is not good... at all.. I bet you took a photo of he real one..? nahhh .. paint it white with watercolor.. than foto again.. should be better.. no nirvana.. but better..

[tom]

Your displacement map is definitely off, how did you derive it?

[Jakakadave]

Not a photo - its a layered photoshop painting the client gave me, which i used crazybump to make a disp map of. Sorry i'm very much a maxwell and all round rendering noob.

here's the original image...

[tom]

Cool, this seems like a height map to me already. Have you directly tried it?

[tokiop]

the image your client gave you should be a better start than the crazybump one. In diplacement the white is high and black low so you should not have highlight and shadows like in the crazybump version.

Have you tested directly with the supplied image?

[Jakakadave]

Ah yes, much better! i didn't think of that - i didnt realise! I have much to learn!

Some images images removed as my client is really funny about their stuff...

Thank you very much guys!

[tom]

As a test it came out like this

[Jakakadave]

Can I ask, what settings did you have for the displacement on that? Still coming out better than mine...

[tom]

Depends. It's all about your base mesh but primarily you should follow these suggestions:

- Use offset 0 for keeping the object surface at a certain position. Meanwhile, know that only absolute blacks in your texture will make no elevation.
- Turn on both Filtering for displacement texture and Smoothing on the displacement panel.
- Avoid proportionally long triangles on the surface, subdivide it in a uniform fashion.
- Increase precision until you have the desired detail out of it. Begin with 16 and go up to 64 or 128. If that's still not enough, check the base mesh triangulation. Or simply check adaptive for auto-precision.

[Jakakadave]

Brilliant Tom, Thank you very much!

Looking much better... still not as good as yours for some reason, but i'll tinker and leard for myself!

[tom]

Cheers!