is there a way to turn your displacement-geometry into real geometry?
wondering,
andre
Heya Andre - the regular displace modifier is visible in the viewport but its quality is dependant on the geometry that’s fed into it - you’ll possibly need to add a meshsmooth or tesselate modifier on to your object before the displace to get an kind of nice results - it’ll give you an idea of how a vray displace mod will work out.
Re: displacement as modeling aid?
Not Vray displacement, no.
add that to the wishlists 
I think it has been already.
like a 1000 times :lol:
I think you missed a couple zeros DaForce…
-dave
Sorry i meant 1000²
:lol:
I think it works nice to use the displacement modifier. In many cases anyway
the regular displacement is so crude. try displacing text.
its just no use.
Andre: it’d be a case of having a high enough poly count for the text shapes to come out smoothly - If you collapsed a vray displaced object into a mesh it’d probably be the same as putting a meshsmooth of 5 or 6 on your object, using the regular displace modifier and then collapsing
You’d still get a massive object and it’d be rather slow - any ideas on where you’d like to do this? The whole point of render time displacement is the viewport benefits of a light base mesh so collapsing would lose this.
I think this is an instance of ‘careful what you wish for.’ Vray massively subdivides the mesh at rendertime to get its smooth displacement.
If you take a comparable object and use max’s displacement and then meshsmooth it to death until it approximated on your screen what you got at rendertime with vray’s displacement, I think you would see its just not viable.
Of course zbrush gets it done in a similiar fashion somehow, but max wasn’t written from the ground up to do that.
I gather if it was collapsable into geometry, something similar to a meshsmooth modifier would be applied with an instance of 1. Then you can up the iterations afterwards to your liking to increase the subdivisions. As an alternative, some sort of ‘optimize’ modifier/algorithm would need to be created.
yep. this is what i had in mind. something that works like: black in the controlling map - no subdivision, grey to white - subdivision of the mesh.
I’d be just as happy if it approximated the displacement in a method similar to how vrayproxies simulate vraymeshes.
Yeah, that would be sweet.