Displacement also creates a bump effect ?

[irwit]

Hi all,

Ill post an example if needed but basically I'm trying out displacements in Vray and am finding that when applying a texture in the displacement of the shader group I press render and get displacement. Easy enough.

However if I lower the displacement settings really low, to the point where there isn't enough subdivision to actually displace the geometry, I still get a bump map effect on the geometry, as if I had applied my displacement map into the bump slot of the shader.

Is this intentional and if so is there a way to disable it ?

I did check a few threads but couldn't find anything mentioned on this.

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks for reading

Will

[vlado]

It is intentional; can you tell me why would you need to disable it? This saves some memory from having to store interpolated vertex normals in exchange for some render time. Typically, it also improves the appearance of the displaced surface (although there are some specific cases where it makes things worse).

Best regards,
Vlado

[irwit]

Thanks for the reply Vlado.

I'm not in any desperate need to turn it off but I was just trying to see exactly what kind of tessellation I was getting from certain setting in the displacement and its harder to see the tessellation results with the bump map on top of the result.

[vlado]

Ah, I see; yep that can be somewhat hard to see. I guess we could add a way to see the geometric normals of the surface, which is usually enough to figure out what the tessellation looks like.

Best regards,
Vlado