Displacement

[Nuno Pereira]

Hey,

I'v simulated a high resolution explosion in maya, and now at render stage.
I want to add more detail into it, so i thought about adding a displacement volume noise.
But when i turn on the displacement, add the volume noise, and make it surface driven, it takes ages to process the displacement and then at render stage it does nothing to the effect of the cloud itself.
Whats the best way to make this work?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Using surface displacement, it's important that you set your surface in the Rendering panel to, say, Smoke, and choose an appropriate surface level - you can temporarily switch the preview to Mesh mode in order to check if the surface is correct. The surface-driven displacement will use this surface as a base for expanding. If you've already done this, is there still no effect if you boost the displacement multiplier, say, 10 times?

Generally I don't recommend using displacement on fire/smoke - as you noticed, it's terribly slow, because reading from textures takes ages and we can't do any of our render optimizations when there is displacement, not to mention it does not look right when animated.

I'd suggest you up your resolution using resimulation - you can check the help file for the 3ds max Phoenix nightlies - it's more up-to-date than the mayan help and describes most of the new features: http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/P220N/Resimulation