new method for displacement

[losbellos73]

Have you seen this new heightfield?
http://www.mitsuba-renderer.org/devblog/

he is the developer of this technique maybe you could deal it into vray...
Miloš Hašan http://miloshasan.net/

I tested myself and I was surprised how effective it is...

[vlado]

What exactly is new about it? Heightfield raytracing has been around for a long time. The "2d displacement" method in V-Ray works in a very very similar way.

In any case, there is no problem to code such a plugin for V-Ray if anyone wants to do it...

Best regards,
Vlado

[losbellos73]

"The height field primitive represents a quad that is vertically displaced by an arbitrary texture. All storage and ray intersection computations are done in image space (i.e. without creating explicit dense triangle geometry), which leads to significantly better performance"

I thought vray does generate very dense geometry for the displacement. render time or only when the geometry has to be sampled
hmm maybe I am wrong.

[vlado]

"The height field primitive represents a quad that is vertically displaced by an arbitrary texture. All storage and ray intersection computations are done in image space (i.e. without creating explicit dense triangle geometry), which leads to significantly better performance"

Yes? This is very very similar to how the 2D displacement method works, as I pointed out.

I thought vray does generate very dense geometry for the displacement.

Not when using 2D displacement.

Best regards,
Vlado

[losbellos73]

fine thx.
its interesting to see that it uses very little memory.
Cool.

[vlado]

its interesting to see that it uses very little memory.

This is one of the advantages of this method, yes. Unfortunately, if you have a complex displacement texture (like a fractal with many iterations, or blends between several fractals) this method can get extremely slow. Also, applying this to curved surfaces is not straightforward. V-Ray improves the speed by pre-caching the texture at a user-specified resolution, and we did some research on how to handle curved surfaces.

Best regards,
Vlado