Closest point on mesh

[AardmanCGI]

Hi,
I want to displace objects with other objects at render time based on a remapped distance from closestpointonmesh.

As the maya plugin isn't impemented is there some other way to do this?

Obviously i could bake out a dirt pass, remap the black and white values and pass this back into the displacement... but it would be great if there was some way to do it all at render time.

Nathan

[bigbossfr]

Hi,
I want to displace objects with other objects at render time based on a remapped distance from closestpointonmesh.

As the maya plugin isn't impemented is there some other way to do this?

Obviously i could bake out a dirt pass, remap the black and white values and pass this back into the displacement... but it would be great if there was some way to do it all at render time.

Nathan

Hi,
You can use vrayDistanceTex for this (in nightly build)

[AardmanCGI]

Thanks for the quick reply - what should we connect to the "objects" attribute of the DistanceTex? I have tried message attributes from locators and meshes but that didn't seem to have any effect.

[bigbossfr]

Thanks for the quick reply - what should we connect to the "objects" attribute of the DistanceTex? I have tried message attributes from locators and meshes but that didn't seem to have any effect.

A Maya set i think ? Like the VRayDirt

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Yes, this set should be even created automatically.

[AardmanCGI]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies,

We stuill cant seem to get this working tho.

We are using maya2011 with the latest vray nightly.

I have see the dist_tex set created automatically but cant now get it to do it...

Also in the AE for the distance texture the objects attr shows up as a texture input? What exact attr from a set should we be connecting to this?

Thanks

[ivaylo.ivanov]

Why do you create it from VRay plugin? In the nightlies it sould be available under"Utilities" textures.

[AardmanCGI]

Ah ok. It didnt occur to me that there would be a different version under the utilities. I saw the one under vray plugins first.

Thanks.

[AardmanCGI]

Hi,
We are finding the vrayDistanceTex really usefull but have an issue where the falloff from 2 or more objects within the distTex set intersect.

As you can see in the picture this creates a perfect line between the 2 objects:



As I believe this texture is generated before render is there a way to blur the result or could this be added.
This would also help with the radiating lines from the spheres which are obviously the result of the sphere mesh de

[AardmanCGI]

sphere mesh density.

cheers

[vlado]

As you can see in the picture this creates a perfect line between the 2 objects:

This is normal, the derivative (slope) of the distance function changes abruptly once it crosses the boundary where the two objects are at equal distances.

As I believe this texture is generated before render is there a way to blur the result or could this be added.

The texture is not generated before rendering. It is computed on the fly for each shaded point so there is no good way to blur it unfortunately. You can however bake it into a texture and do the blurring manually.

Best regards,
Vlado