blend material does not blend displacement

[len_xie]

blend material does not blend displacement, I know you can remix all displacement in the out most level using vray output surface port, but is it possible to have blend material do the displacement mix automatically?

[chakarov]

Hello len_xie , V-Ray Blend Material can only blend BRDFs (Materials) , displacement is a rendertime mesh deforming technique and that is why it can't be mixed with V-Ray Blend Material.

[len_xie]

ok, what about give material biulder node a "surface" output, so that we can do the displacement mix outside more easily, or else, it means we have to dive into each of the network, copy the displacement map , back to the root level,paste and mix,when all of those displacement map are in one place, its very easy to get confused ,which is which. better naming would help of course, then that's more work.

[chakarov]

Surface and Volume output is not exposed to material builder, because there are no plugins to manipulate them. As workaround you could use V-Ray Referenced Shader and refer to any V-Ray shader/texture node in any mat context.

[len_xie]

thanks , didn't know about there is a node for referenceing.

[doppelgaengerdigital]

I thought this is possible in Houdini, as it seems to be working in 3dsmax, to blend displacements with their materials on the blend material node.
Is there any option to make this process easier to handle? Or did I miss something?

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey doppelgaengerdigital ,

I've messaged some colleagues in our internal chats but I suppose it won't hurt to approach you as well - as far as I am aware, the displacement is applied as a geometry modifier in 3ds Max (rather than a material). Could you please send a simple 3ds Max scene to us that showcases what you would like to be able to do?

Best regards!

[doppelgaengerdigital]

thank you for reaching out! I thought about something Jonas does in his tutorials. The VrayMaterial in 3ds has a displacement slot, which seems to be passed through. This would be awesome and can save so much time and clean up my shading networks a LOT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04qRDADKO7A&t=872s

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey doppelgaengerdigital ,

Thank you, I understand now! The textures for displacement are also handled automatically under the hood and blended together to produce the final result. I will check with our developers to see if we could automate this somehow on the Houdini end.

Best regards!

[doppelgaengerdigital]

It looks like it is handles automatically. This would be super nice to make this work in Houdini also.
Would save us so much time!

best,
stefan