[Bubbaloo]

I created a displacement slate tile material for a scene I'm working on and it is exhibiting some strange behavior in the grout lines.
Here's the trouble:


And here is the isolated fireplace, rendered with sun as the only light source:

Isolated, it works correctly...

I checked the geometry to make sure there were no coincident faces, and the mesh is subdivided to about 2 or 3 inch polygons all over:

Do you think maybe there are some polygons that need to be divided again because they are too rectangular?

Any thoughts on this will be appreciated!

[JCAddy]

That material kicks arse!

Can you show a wireframe of the fireplace with everything else turned on in your scene?

[Bubbaloo]

Thanks, Jason. Here's the wire:


Any ideas?
What's strange is, it happens on the fireplace, but not the columns which are subdivided the same. I can do some cleanup in PS to correct it, but you know, I shouldn't have to, right? It's a matter of principal... Or my stubborn-ness.

[KurtS]

try to check "adaptive" in the displacement layer.

[Bubbaloo]

try to check "adaptive" in the displacement layer.

Nope, Kurt, that didn't do it. I can't figure it out.

[Mihai]

You have interpolation on or off? Show a piece of the displacement texture at 100%, it would help. Also is it 8 bit or 16 bit?

[Fernando Tella]

Could it be some hidden geometry that shows in render? It happened to me once that a copy (or an instance, can't remember now) of an object which was hidden in viewport showed in render no matter what I did.
Is there something hidden in that place?

[Bubbaloo]

You have interpolation on or off? Show a piece of the displacement texture at 100%, it would help. Also is it 8 bit or 16 bit?

Here's the full displacement map (16 bit):
http://www.divshare.com/download/4260178-649

Filtering off, smoothing on, height 1cm absolute, offset 1.0, precision 64.

Grout color has it's own weight mapped layer.

I will do a test to see if offset 0.0 helps. I have offset 1.0 because I wanted the whit parts of the displacement map to be the outside edge and the grout lines to sink in 1 cm.

[Bubbaloo]

Could it be some hidden geometry that shows in render? It happened to me once that a copy (or an instance, can't remember now) of an object which was hidden in viewport showed in render no matter what I did.
Is there something hidden in that place?

That's what I thought, too, but I checked and didn't find anything there.

[Mihai]

Brian since the lines are so thin in the texture, I think you need to increase the precision. Also turning smoothing off might help in this case. When rendering the higher rez, there are very few pixels in the texture to accurately displace the geometry, so perhaps smoothing off might help and since the displacement geometry is flat, smoothing is not needed.

You could also keep the texture at 2048, but have it contain 4 times less tiles (so then make the lines 4 times thicker), then just tile the map 4 times on the geometry.

[Bubbaloo]

Ok, I will try your suggestions. Thanks!

[Bubbaloo]

Whoopty-doo!

Here's a scene I have been working on today:


What de heck is goin on?

[KurtS]

developing your own style?

[Bubbaloo]

Here's a preview of the material:

[Bubbaloo]

developing your own style?

Yeah, that's some fancy brickwork, huh...