Displacement and Opacity map problem - grill making

[Morne]

Hi all

I'm making a grill from a plane using "tiles" map for the displacement and also for the opacity. So my grill is just a plane with tiles in opacity to make the holes in the plane and get the edges of the grill. So it gives a grid of 10 X 10 square holes in it. Perfect, now we need some thickness to the grill. For this I add displacement using the tiled opacity map. With 3D displacemant mapping I get a grill with chunks eaten out the sides of the edges. With 2D displacement I get a perefect grill but then the opacity map gets ignored and instead of a grill with holes in, I get a grill with black bottom. The map is a tile with black (0,0,0) square and white (255,255,255) edge. I have switched "blur" in the map to 0.01 down from the default of 1 (to get crisp edges)

Any other ideas on how to make the grill? Actual geometry might be too heavy as I have thousands of grills with about 10 variations in size. Maybe 10 different vrayproxies?

Any thoughts?

[rivoli]

instead of an opacity map you can use the water level in the displacement modifier properties, even though it should be working with opacity as well.

[Morne]

I'm displacing 60mm. The water level on 0 does nothing. -100 Does nothing. 100 Erases the whole thing. 60 makes it thin as paper WITH holes. less than 60 does nothing.

[Morne]

duh on my part. I had real world mapping with mapscaler. Changed it to normal UV mapping and it worked fine. Would be nice though if you could use real world mapping

[3DMK]

Hi all

Maybe 10 different vrayproxies?

Any thoughts?

When possible, Real geometry is always the way the go.......sooo much faster to render.
Do your 10 versions, proxy them up & away you go......and you don't waste time waiting for displacement anymore which can be very very slow with GI calculations.
I do a lot of test renders tweaking stuff & have found proxys save me a lot of time by the end.

Note** also if you use Vray RT you will see the proxies but not any displacement, as it's not supported yet

Cheers

[Morne]

yes I've decided to go the proxy route. I can use lower render settings this way and still get good result