[Fernando Tella]

Cheers; what is content-linking? Don't find that in the manual...

Please try the earlier suggested "abed-sabeh carpet MXM" - with on the fly it renders three-dimensional, change it to pretessellated and will render two-dimensional, no matter if in a "fresh" or "old" file. Map quality is a different issue; even a "bad" map should displace in both modes, no?

Here it works fine on both modes.

Rendered from 3dsmax 2012, Maxwell 2.7.10, plugin 2.7.6

Tried embedded and referenced both pretess and on the fly. Everything ok.

Did you checked the version of everything?

[feynman]

Nah, 2.6 or 2.7, on different PC, using Studio, plane OBJ coming from Rhino, Alias, JavaView - no joy with "pretessellated". I just use "on the fly" or rather photoshop some carpet in which should be quickest.

[rusteberg]

i really don't feel like reading through 8 pages unless there's something to look at... sooooo here's an option for using vector displacement for carpet:

Here's a quick sculpt with vector displacement export settings from Zbrush:



Here it is rendered using the vector displacement map:



*this example isn't exactly tileable* Instead of increasing the resolution of your mesh to accommodate detail on a larger scale, you could just instance/tile the mesh:



Like this:



And render thousands of instanced planes that will not consume any more memory and maintain the same level of detail:



map *this isn't the original one, rather optimized jpeg for web*:



disp settings:

[Polyxo]

Damn, you get Zbrush Vec-Displacement to work from Max...
I (and others) never got this feature to work with Maxwell.

Could you be so kind and share the .ztl and tell me what flip and switch values you used?
I would love to replicate your workflow with the mesh imported into Rhino.

[polynurb]

i really don't feel like reading through 8 pages unless there's something to look at...

i agree

thanks for that z-brush insight.. looks like a very powerful workflow.

before your rag loom images made me give it a try.

i did a quick goole image search and got some seed maps.
for both materials i used pix plant to extract the displacement maps.
for the red colored one i tried to remove the existing ambient occlusion w. shadow/highlight filter
it does have it's limitations but i found some of the results quite interesting
i used pre tesselated for all of these except the close up shot with the red stripes and the render of the furry bench at the bottom of the post. that last one is using the "abed-sabeh carpet MXM", it's a good material!

daniel

[eric nixon]

Wow this thread got a lot cooler, Thanks Rusteberg I was just looking into this and had to give up - couldnt find any vector maps of hairs and wasnt about to learn z-brush.
I made a tilable version of your vector map and stuck it on the persian rug, I upped the settings, uses about 30gigs, good news is same performance as normal disp slightly longer voxelisation. Bad news is the map I made has some artifacts and tiles quite noticably, really need a bigger patch of source...

Ragwool looks good.

Feynman (and you really should have worked this out by now ), theres no disp because you havent got 1000 gigs of ram which is what you need for those settings....

[Polyxo]

Edit: Solved! Using the larger bitdepth-map brought better results

Eric,
does the vector displacement rusteberg posted look identical in Cinema4D to the 3DSMax-version?
Clearly not so in Rhino but also not in Studio, which I tried for reference.

I replicated rustebergs settings and used a basemesh with the same density he used.
Both Studio and Rhino do something in the direction of the the original sculpt.
(in the case of Rhino after a lot of tweaking with the object size and after flipping normals).
But the deformed mesh in both cases does not really match, also they don't at all capture the volume
of the strands. No problem with 3DSMax as it seems....

Studio


Rhino

[eric nixon]

Rusteberg rendered it ok in maxwell? maybe the jpg isnt enough.

[rusteberg]

try using the original 16bit tiff: http://www.wanderplay.com/renderings/originalTHINGY.zip

[rusteberg]

I made a tilable version of your vector map and stuck it on the persian rug, I upped the settings, uses about 30gigs, good news is same performance as normal disp slightly longer voxelisation. Bad news is the map I made has some artifacts and tiles quite noticably, really need a bigger patch of source...

Ragwool looks good.

play with the uploaded tiff.... it's by no means the "gold standard", but should give you an idea of its possibilities.... maybe you can make something more of it

agreed on the posts daniel made... they do look good.

[Polyxo]

Ok, the larger bitdepth map indeed solved the issue!
Stuff now looks identical in Rhino and in Studio.

But how do you set up the scale Rusteberg?
This map now only works somehow well if it is about 4m large...
Which is quite a bit too large.

How do you create a piece of geometry in Zbrush, then export it in the unit-less .obj-format
and then have control that the vector-displacement matches your scene-scale in 3DSMax?
Just changing export-size for the mesh in Zbrush seems not to be the solution. It scales the
mesh as well as the displacement-effect.

Thanks, Holger

[polynurb]

a few more for your precious retinas:

tweaked the material with some thin SSS
this render was about 30min on 36 physical cores with 3 channels multilight
displacement on the fly

[eric nixon]

Sofa looks a bit 'crunchy' perhaps use a less diffuse more shiny mxm with some r2, and also that disp map kind of describes a mountain range, for thin-ss to work you need to disp the actual hairs. (well thin cones actually) you could try the map I posted earlier. Also bear in mind its good to put a 'dark lambert backing geo' underneath, otherwise you might get a slightly see-thru sofa.



here is tilable (somewhat damaged) version of the vector map, used in above render;

http://www.mediafire.com/?2ysaunvsdas3aq9

and a weightmap for the tips;



Heres an attempt at applying at small scale (uses 30gigs ram, slow to voxelise). There seem to be issues with the export from C4D and I needed to reverse the normals, at the end of the day its a pain pain pain and grass does a much better job of this, or hair if your using MAX. Vector disp Vs disp seems like a normal Vs bump, it works best for undulating things not itty bitty things...

Feeling pissed off.. it was really hard to make this work.. and interface glitches with the scale input in mxed.. grrrrr...... going to play TF2 for a while...

[rusteberg]

here's a regular displacement without any diffuse texture:



alternate with diffuse:

[Polyxo]

Thanks for ignoring all my questions Rusteberg!
A short answer could really have helped sorting out some of my long-standing problems with Zbrush.
Certainly not only mine.