VRay displacement to particles?

[LarsSonparsson]

How to apply vray displacement to particles?

I'm using instanced geometry inside pflow. No matter if I put displacement modifier to
pflow itself or instanced geometry, it just doesn't have any effect.

-LarsSon

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Little question... u got ticked up displacement in settings right ? both in Vray and f10...maybe its just disabled by render by accident...

[LarsSonparsson]

Yep, displacement is on everywhere.

I think that the reason is how pflow mesh is generated. It wont take the displacement from instances, because pflow geometry is generated already before render starts.
But I dont understand why displacement modifier added to pflow itself doesn't give any results.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

humh.. are particle maped/displacement? maybe try mesher...

[jordanw]

A VrayDisplacementMod wont work as the pflow geometry is like a collapsed version of the mesh so the vrayDispMod gets removed. Have you tried doing the displacement through the material then making sure your displacement tab in the render settings is set up properly?
If that dosent work, just use a mesher like DADAL said.

[LarsSonparsson]

Thats't what I thought.

Can't use mesher, because the geometry is too complex. I'm creating animated opening flowers that are actually groups containing different materials and ID's.
Main thing is to get displacements subdivisions to work. I can't have all that geometry going through the pflow, so I'd like to do the geometry subdividing during render time.
I could try it from render settings -> butting grey displacement to material with zero effect. That way I could get subdivided geometry without displace effect, right?

-LarsSon

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Uh dunno what u mean with the above one... but if ur pf flow is set up nicely... maybe u can simply render it on parts? If its made of 5 parts/groups just make 5 separated pflow events and render them one at a time using mesher... check for other (uncheck) visible to camera to get proper colision and so on, and maybe that would work... Good luck...

[LarsSonparsson]

Thanks for help and suggestions! Yes, I could find a workaround for this, but mostly I'd like to get the displacement to work with particles.
I'm now thinking some future projects, where I might end up having the same problem again.

So I'd be happy if someone could clarify, is that even possible with current Vray.

-LarsSon

[joconnell]

Hi Larsson,

I've found for things like this pflow is actually quite bad - heavy geometry is nasty enough, heavy animated geometry must be worse again. I did a project a few years back with swarms of coca cola bottles that were instanced geometry and for maybe 3000 bottles with about 1500 - 2000 polys each it was taking over an hour to prepare the geometry for each frame - the actual render was quite quick but the pflow update was killing. For really heavy tasks I think the processing engine in pflow is a bit weak - it updates randomly at the slightest touch, often with things that don't even affect it. Thinking particles is a far better processor for large poly counts in this regard.

For your problem right now I'd look into using a script to make copies of your flowers from the particle flow setup so you'll end up with loads of individual mesh flowers - there's a lot of ways to keep the same group and material assignments and if not, it should be easy enough to isolate your particles in such a way to make selection sets that you can use for each material. It's less convenient admittedly but you'll get infinitely faster results. Vlado had to jump through a lot of hoops to get particle flow support working properly in Vray but it's definitely quicker if you can get the geometry out in some other way - plus your displacement will work!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Just an alternative maybe... could work/not dunno but try using after effect/nuke etc software particle generators and so on... I know u could render out object, its rotation in max, and then load squence to after effect particle generator (plugin cant remember which one atm) and it will use the image squence to create particles.... maybe that could fit in ur project as alternative for now..

[jordanw]

have a look at this workflow, it's for using vray proxies as particles, will work with objects with displacement modifiers too
http://www.orbaz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1898

[PsychoSilence]

@ Lars: Have you looked into SuperMesher yet? I use it massively with geometry particles. You can put modifiers on the SuperMesher objects like on any other geometry. Besides fun like bend and twist modifiers or easy re-timing after you cached the particles you can use the vray displacement modifier as well its pretty cheap and prolly right now your best bet since TP starts at 500USD up to 1300USD. SuperMesher is 125 dollars atm for a single license (the render only licenses are free and unlimited)... Another thing you could look into in the future is particle flow box#3's disk cache. Once caches you should be able to scrubb through your animation without pflow updating every time. And yes, admittedly pflow is a b*tch with heavy, animated geometry. Solution here: http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/...ingObjects.htm link your geometry to the particles transform matrix OUTSIDE of pflow. i have a tutorial for replacing pflow with vray/mr proxies as well: http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/...ow-treeproxies this in connection with bobo's transform script might get you there with decent render times since everything is proxies

hope that helps a bit

Ansi