possible to bake out displacement with vray?

[leabum]

I have a character that has corrective displacement maps (wrinkles ...) driven by the rig. All of those displacements run together into a PlusMinAveragenode. Now I am doing some grooming in XGen on a alembic and I also want to assign the displacement to it. I could not find an option in to export 32 bit images as a sequence out of maya or with any script out there. Also I have multiple UV tiles which vray supports as far as I know for baking. Is it possible to bake such an displacement imagesquence out with vray? Very unique question I know, but I thought anybody might know.

[yolov]

You can just save out your baked textures to 32-bit EXR files.
The tiled baking is supported for to UDIM tiles and is accessible from the baking option sets created from either the VRay shelf or the Lighting/Shading menu.
Tiled baking doesn't support sequences, though, unlike the texture baking from the render settings > Common tab.
Both baking settings respect the output image format options so both support baking to 32-bit exr files.

[leabum]

It works. I just went ahead and assigned a vray light MTL to the face and plugged the PlusMinusAverage in its Colorinput. First I am rendering out Umin/max = 0/1 and for the second tile Umin/max = 1/2, so that I have both tiles for every frame. I also tested Ptex baking for 10 frames, but after baking the first frame it gives me the error: 'Fatal error freeing exporter memory'!

Also loading the UV based textures I baked into a filenode (set to RAW) and enabling 'allow negative colors' will clip all negative values once I activate the sequence option to actually have the displacement animated. That always happens unsing any extra option like UV tiling modes or in this case the 'use sequence' in Mayas filenodes with 32 bit float images. Any suggestion, I will also ask this in the Maya forum, and post solutions here once they come up.

[yolov]

If you're using those textures for displacement afterwards, you can try setting the displacement bounds to manual and specify a range from say -10/+10 or -5/+5. That can be found in the Displacement control extra vray attributes.
Can you share a scene that produces the "fatal error freeing exporter memory" with ptex?

[leabum]

Thank you Alex, setting them manual actually works. So it is Vray that clips negative values per default when using sequences or multitiling? (Suggestion: Maya 2016 does not allow negative values in the colorpicker, which the displacement bounds rely on. So I plugged in a multiply devide to set the negative values which is not very user friendly. Maybe think of replacing the colorswatches with a float slider or similar.)

Here is a link to my dropbox with the whole maya project, so you have the textures and connections working when setting the project. I could not find a way to upload .mb files here in the forum.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2vg6t8ty6...30Fvdylka?dl=0

[yolov]

V-Ray can detect the boundaries automatically, but I need to check for what file formats this actually works. For some it doesn't and you need to enter the boundaries manually. Maya 2016 doesn't allow negative color picking, yes, but as far as I remember, but one of the color picker modes still allows it - RGB float (0-1). I'll have the scene looked at next week. Just a note in advance - monday and tuesday are official holidays for us and the office will be closed.