VRay Displacement stepping

[kimgar]

sure, there's a stripped down max file attached. the difference between vray rt and standard is quite a thing.

samuel, the bercon maps are great indeed, but we want to keep plugins to a minimum if possible for compatibility reasons. inverted circular cellular sounds interesting, but maybe a bit complicated to produce a smoke map?

i really like the GLSL idea, but must say i am pretty fuzzy about how to go about it, anyone know a good smoke algorithm?

[samuel_bubat]

samuel, the bercon maps are great indeed, but we want to keep plugins to a minimum if possible for compatibility reasons. inverted circular cellular sounds interesting, but maybe a bit complicated to produce a smoke map?

No not really, depending on the settings most max procedurals can actually produce a similar result to other procedurals.
As far as I can see you want to make water.
Here is something similar to your image, made from 2 mixed Cellular maps.


btw. Bercon Maps should really part of that.. minimum

[kimgar]

hah! that is cool samuel, i'm gonna have to look at the inverted cellulars, i wonder how it animates. and yes, agreed about the bercon maps, we'll have to consider bringing them aboard again

wow, i just had that illusion again, when noise suddenly seems to go inverted...more coffee!

[katho3d]

We coded all the textures for V-Ray RT ourselves, so we were careful to avoid this issue.

Best regards,
Vlado

Hello Vlado,

that leads me to the question, would it be possible to integrate this self coded textures into V-Ray Advanced too?

[Neilg]

If you're too far gone to re-do the maps, it's due to the scale of your largest procedural - if you have a few of them being mixed together, you can have 3 of them at scales of 5, 10, and 15, and another one scaled to 60000000 - and it's that one that'll produce the stepping issue. Dropping the size of your largest one might be enough to scale it down where it's less of an issue. I replaced my huge one with a clouds bitmap from photoshop in another mapping channel and the problem was barely visible.

I can also confirm it happens with all procedurals in max - some just don't need to be used at the same scale as others so it's less visible.
This is also why some people haven't seen it. If they take one that works, add a noise in a mix at 1% scaled to something crazy huge and render the same issue will come up.

[kimgar]

ah, thanks for the insight cubicle, 'too far gone to redo the maps' is an accurate assumption

there's just one smoke map in the scene in question though. uv's and scale are relative i guess, but camera is real close to the surface, and as you say, that's when the banding appears; with large scales or closeup renders.

too bad about the cellulars being affected as well, i was kind of ready to try that today

[Neilg]

edit: Just did a test, I cant get the stepping to show up in cellular - seems to be fine. Sorry - I remember testing a couple but I think it may have been just smoke & the different types of noise. cellular is fine, just smoke/noise that have the issue.

It's always too late when this pops up - I went through a job working for 2 weeks thinking the water looked great at tests, animated it, rendered out the animation a dvd res, still great, then went to do a high res still at 5k and caught the banding everywhere. So close to the deadline :/

[kimgar]

ah, cool! that is good news. i will have to give it a go and see how it flows. at least this deadline gives me a small amount of room for experiments.
be it banding, missing xrefs or general max hiccups you can always count on that last hiccup when the client is at the door.