Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

[steelers05]

Is there any chance we could see an option to visually see the scale and position of a bump/disp. map on the face in which the material is applied. I find myself wanting something like this when creating materials like water where i can just take the characteristics of glass and apply a bump/disp. map and achieve acceptable results. Another example would be if I just wanted to use a simple color for a floor but wanted it to look tiled with seems/grout lines....i can apply the color but I have no idea of where my bump/disp map will be mapped and the scale of it. Same problem if I wanted to just use a bump map with a simple color to create a siding material. I just think this would be really useful to many people's work flow.

[thomthom]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

The displacement map multiplier is the amount of inches a white pixel will be displaced. A displacement multiplier of 10 gives you a 10 inch displacement.

[steelers05]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

im referring more to how the bump/disp is actually mapped to the geometry...not the displacement distance. I wish we were able to visually see in our SU viewport the way a bump map is applied to a face (Scale and orientation). I think it would just be useful because u cam create so many materials with just a solid color and bump/displacement map, but if you only use a solid color, currently you cant see how the bump map is going to be applied and u really dont have much control over the position and orientation of it. I have been using workarounds to achieve what i want but its still kind of a pain in the but (for example: I made white leather the other by using a solid white color and a bump map that i had...I first applied the bump as its own texture to get that scale and orientation that I wanted for it, then added the bump map to match the scale of the original map (Which i guess vray does automatically?). Then because I just wanted it to be white, I erased the original map and just made the material white in the diffuse slot. I did the same thing for making water by using a glass material and water disp. map to create the water effect. It seems to work that way, but it is kind of annoying to do it because if you ever have to reorient or rescale your material, you seem need to start back at the beginning of the process and that gets frustrating quickly.

[steelers05]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

another good use for something like this would be for if anyone ever uses reflection maps...i would like to see something similar to the way 3ds max handles materials. It enables you to just switch on a button and you can visually see how a bump, displacement, reflection, and etc. are mapped to an object instead of only being able to see the diffuse map like in sketchup. This sort of option would just be very useful for making more complex materials.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

1 ) Set the displacement map as your diffuse map in SU's Material Editor and scale it using SU's UV scaling tools or globally.

2 ) Create a second diffuse layer in VfSU's Material Editor and set it up exactly as you normally would for your first diffuse layer, i.e. displacement, bump, etc.

3 ) Create a 255,255,255 white bitmap (any size, I use 200 x 200 px so I can view it as a thumbnail), save it to your bitmaps library and load it in the "Transparency" slot of your first diffuse layer. This is the trick- it means that your first diffuse layer will stay visible in SU's viewport, but will render invisible in VfSU, meaning only your second diffuse layer (the one that actually has displacement) will render. It relies on the fact that VfSU doesn't transfer transparency information back to SU from clipmaps the way that it does with RBG AColors so we can exploit that.

Now your displacement mapping will be visible in SU's viewport and you can rescale it to your heart's content from within SU without having to change anything else.

The same "double-diffuse-layer-with-white-bitmap-transparency" trick can be used any time you want to be able to preview a VfSU material bitmap (bump, emissive, etc) in SU or to have better control over material layer scales. Of course it means your SU model will look crazy (black and white spotty grass instead of green for example as you're seeing the displacement map instead of the diffuse map), but if it's only for rendering then it's the only way to preview the scale of displacement, bump, emissive, clip maps, etc.

[steelers05]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

Oh ok, that makes sense. Its a bit of extra work and it would be nice to see something similar to how max handles this, but this workaround will be very helpful. Thank you for the good tip and quick response.

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

thanks jackson that is really a great trick. i assume this is the same now taht i will do with seperate bump map. thanks

[dkendig]

Re: Visual Bump/Displacement Map Scaling

Yeah, unfortunately SketchUp isn't 3D Studio Max by any stretch of the imagination. Developing for it is shall we say... an adventure... The viewport might be able to handle some extra bells and whistles, but I wouldn't expect to see 3ds functionally in this product unless they do a complete overhaul on it. I'll be happy the day they prove me wrong.