Accurate Displacement Workflow from ZBrush / Mudbox to VRay Maya

[RockinAkin]

Accurate Displacement Workflow

I've just finished writing up a displacement mapping workflow tutorial that covers generating an accurate 32bit displacement map from ZBrush or Mudbox, and correctly applying it in VRay for Maya or 3ds Max.

There's often a lot of confusion and misinformation surrounding displacement maps and how they're supposed to work. You'll sometimes see artists load a displacement map onto their low resolution geometry and play with intensity and depth values until it looks somewhat similar to their high resolution geometry and assume that's it's as close as they can get. But with this workflow you wont have to eyeball any 'amount' settings, or rely on normal mapping for fine details, or settle for 'close enough' - the correctly generated/applied displacement map will match your high resolution geometry accurately from the start.

So have a look and let me know if you have any feedback. Hope it helps out. Thanks!

[FSGFX]

Thanks for the great tutorial.!
What about 16bit maps. There are cases where are you forced to use 16bit maps. Mainly in huge production scene to hold the Data smaller.

[KyronVFX]

Thank you for the tutorial. Will try to test it out sometimes (it looks like you are using pretty much default settings besides unchecking smooth UV´s and connecting the R color to the displacement node?). We usually use 16 bit tiffs from zBrush and often have to change the displacement amount and shift to get the right look.

[RockinAkin]

Thanks for the great tutorial.!
What about 16bit maps. There are cases where are you forced to use 16bit maps. Mainly in huge production scene to hold the Data smaller.

If they're 16bit floating-point maps (half-float) they will work just fine in this workflow - you'll get the same results.
If they're 16bit integer maps, then they wont work in this workflow and you'll have to do the whole displacement amount and shift song and dance... so dont use integer maps for displacement as a rule of thumb.

Even so, OpenEXR has very good lossless compression algorithms so going with full 32bit still results in very managable filesizes.

[RockinAkin]

Thank you for the tutorial. Will try to test it out sometimes (it looks like you are using pretty much default settings besides unchecking smooth UV´s and connecting the R color to the displacement node?). We usually use 16 bit tiffs from zBrush and often have to change the displacement amount and shift to get the right look.

Right, you don't want a 16bit integer tiff from ZBrush, but a floating-point map instead. That way you wont have to mess with displacement amount or shift settings - you'll get the right displacement from the start.

[4th-Child]

Awesome stuff my friend!! its great to have this info

[dre4mer]

Thank you for posting this information! This has been a source of confusion!