Vray Triplanar into Texture Deform node

[beavertron]

Hi,

I may be trying to fit a square through a circle here, but has anyone found a way of plugging the vray triplanar node into the texture deform node in maya. The reason for this is that i actually want to deform a high poly object using the control that vray offers. Using the maya projection node in triplanar doesn’t give any blending control between a height map from each axis and jus gives a solid hard edge, very ugly blending.

I am actually hoping i be able to deform a terrain with a tiled displacement map from substance, further filtering this with a splatmap to certain areas, such as rock faces and then blending in a triplanar manner. So maybe there is a node or two to place between to get the two to work?

Thanks

[yolov]

The VRayTriplanar won't work there. I'll make a note for the devs to look into whether this is possible at all. You can refer to VMAYA-7726 for more details in the future.
Is it an option for you to use displacement instead of texture deformation? The triplanar won't work directly as a displacement map, but if you hook it through a ramp it will work (not sure if it's not just a coincidence that it does, but it does).
You won't have any sort of viewport preview, though.

The simple setup would be: create a ramp, delete all but one positions, connect the triplanar to that position, then connect the ramp as displacement.

[beavertron]

Hi Yolov,

Thank you, I will give the ramp node trick a try. Unfortunately i need to actually displace the geometry and not just at render time. I completely understand that this is not fully supported it was just that the brilliant options your triplanar node has gives a next level of control to anything else. I think i may have been trying to be too clever in one move.

I just found a workaround, alternate method which is to project the triplanar heightmap, but then use the vray to bake out a diffuse pass as exr across the UV’s. I was then able to apply this texture image file to plug into the texture deform node with success. I still need to tweak to get the best out of this. Thank you for the ramp trick as well, i will try this out, as it may work directly as well, completely cutting out this step.

The idea is to apply this to a super high poly terrain so the displacement detail is captured, filter by a splatmap to target only rock faces for example, then decimate the terrain to a poly friendly amount. I am hoping a really fast method of detailing and texturing large environments.

Thank you again for the advice

Much appreciated.

[yolov]

Ah, I didn't think of baking it, that sounds like a good solution, although any tweaks will require re-baking. With the ramp, you could do an IPR to tweak the settings until you're happy and then either use it as is or bake it.

[beavertron]

Thanks Alex,

I will give that a try, great idea with the IPR.