Dimpled metal

[tricky]

I've got a texture that needs to be applied to a bunch of sign panels in a shopping mall, but I'm finding it a bit tricky. I've got it 'kinda' working with displacement using a bercon tile map, but its taking ages (over an hour for just the lightcache so far!)

Does anyone have a better suggestion for this? It needs to reflect the lights etc. This sample is only about 10cm across.

[duke2]

Why can't you do it as a bump map? I'd model it and render out a heightmap and use that.

[tricky]

I will try - I did have a brief go with bump mapping but it was a bit shit.

[sv]

why wouldn't you model it?

[GALACTUS]

You could also model a section and generate a normal map from it, would be better than a bump map ah recon.

[3DMK]

Vray Proxy

Is it possible to model a repeating section that can be converted to a Vray proxy???
From my experience no amount of bump map or even normal mapping comes close to real 3D geometry.

If you are using displacement to try and get a realistic mesh then just build it as a real mesh if possible as the results will be much better and render soo much faster.
If you are going the texture method then definately use a normal map as it will work much better than a bump map and turn bitmap blur to 0.1 so that it picks up the small details especially on a glancing angle.

Cheers