Displacement shift value?

[kriscabrera15]

Am curious if there is an exact way of determining the Shift value in the displacement mod?

[voltron7]

I read here somewhere that is is (neg value) one half of the disp amount.

ie. [1"] would be shift value of [-0.5"]

hopefully others can confirm/correct this possible answer...

[kriscabrera15]

yea that what i was guessing, did think it was right though, thanks! hopefully someone else can confirm also, maybe vlado =)

[Neilg]

What do you mean exact shift value? it's whatever you want it to be, there is no correct answer.

[Morbid Angel]

This really depends on a couple of things. What scale did you bake your maps in? did you bake them as 32 bit float, or 16 bit half exr? or did you bake them as tifs? General rule is that the scale really is the only important factor in displacement. If you lets say paint a displacement map and your brush intensity is 10 (max) then your displacement should be in that range, where offset of this would be negative half. Nowadays mudbox bakes in that offset into your map. But I usually just bake out 32 bit float exr and plug it in at 1/0 intensity/offset and not worry about that stuff.

[kriscabrera15]

yea that what i was refering to, so it depends on how it come out of lets say zbrush or mudbox. Now your saying if you export 32bit disp you dont have to worry about the values because it baked in? is that something mudbox only does or its across the board?

[Morbid Angel]

is that something mudbox only does or its across the board?

I think if you can export 32 bit full float tif out of zbrush then it will also work I haven't experimented with most recent versions of zbrush but I heard its possible. Otherwise in mudbox its pretty easy, it stores both positive and negative value in relationship to scale of your scene (where you baked from) in the exr so you just bring it in and all that data is automatically applied. There is a few things to note here though. Often in displacement there are min/max bounds which limit the search distance of the float texture (for performance sake) so make sure its either set to auto or you have enough range there. One way to find out is if your positive negative data is high, like -10/10 then you would set those bounds to be with in that range (a bit higher) otherwise this info will be clipped.