Vray - animate text surfacing out of a flat surface using displacement

[cum. m+d]

Hi everybody,

Im currently doing a project that requires me to animate text surfacing out of a flat surface.

https://vimeo.com/104346700

The link attached above is my reference, what I'm aiming to achieve is similar to the effects at (00:03-00:06) and (00:20-00:22).
In Maya 2015 (Vray 3.3), I used an exported TIFF sequence (animated text) from After Effects CC 2015 as a displacement map to extrude the text.

Displacement Map used for the final image "IMAGEBC"
16-bits
res: 4092 x 4092

IMAGE_A1 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6...lBTZWNON1JXT2s

The surface that I added the displacement on was just a smoothed plane with the scale of 1,1,1

IMAGE A (displacement map) : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6...UhlMWlKc1ZabWs

This is my displacement map with 50% gray as my background. I tried using both 16-bits and 32-bits TIFF sequence but I couldn't get a sharp edge for my displacement.
Tried both 4k and 8k resolution for the displacement map as I thought the texture wasn't high res enough.
I smoothed and increased the subdivision of the plane before applying displacement . So far this is what I got.

IMAGE BC : https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6...m1rZTZzbm05Y1k

This is my settings in maya 2015

Image D :https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6...GZxZGo0d2YwdEk

If you guys think that this is not the correct method, may I know how would you guys do it?

Any suggestion or tips would be greatly appreciated!
Thankyou!

[Morbid Angel]

its a bit tough with the letters. If you in theory want to get super sharp edge, its going to need extremely high poly count. I'd suggest making a plane exactly the size of the text no bigger, it might help with the crispness, but also blurring the letters a bit will help, there is no magic solution here imho though.

[cum. m+d]

Any advise on using displacements with distinct shapes like those in the reference video included?

Upon looking at my own tests, the sides are always really messed up.

How do you guys think they achieved what is shown in the reference video?

I am not starting to think perhaps -> Animated boolean geometry with a decent boolean plugin like hard-mesh (not sure if it is decent) coupled with auto round edges and also that new bevel tool that causes two objects intersecting to automatically bevel as well?

Anyone else has other suggestions?

[Morbid Angel]

Well vray now has vrayClipper which essentially does that already...

[Svetlozar Draganov]

Like Dmitry suggested VRayClipper should do the job much better than VRayDisplacement.
Here is one quick example with scaled beveled text used by VRayClipper to clip the Box behind:
http://ftp.chaosgroup.com/support/sc...1_13-58-20.mp4

scene: http://ftp.chaosgroup.com/support/sc...xt_clipping.mb

[ricorio]

maybe you could give the render time booleans a go:

http://therenderblog.com/render-time...aydistancetex/

[super gnu]

maybe you could give the render time booleans a go:

http://therenderblog.com/render-time...aydistancetex/

this is basically what vrayclipper automates. under the skin it uses the same method.