inspired by the great pineapple-material on vray-materials.de, i came up with this chain:
its not perfect, but…
here´s a screenshot of the underlying mesh:
displacementmap looks like this:
should be easy to animate too. just offset the mapping.
andre
nice!
how are the holes created?
with the waterlevel setting in the modifier?
hehe.. very nice..
Although i would just model it and use path deform, but nice idea.
/Thomas
yes its a displacement with waterlevel.
i tried it with the displacement of the material as well, masking the holes, but i couldn´t get the same detail as with the modifier.
very good! 
nice what are rendertimes?
glossy reflections obviously make it slow.
without reflections its about a minute on a amd 4600+.
i think may be geometry renders faster, but that was not the point.
i was thinking of using displacement as a bitmap-driven mold.
this is blowing my mind, I don’t understand how you displaced it with that map…
yea im skratching my a head a bit too. can you post a grab of your displacement settings?
it looks really cool
thanks,
-joe
wow, impressive.
water level is such a great feature, really powerful as you demonstrate here.
good stuff.
Really incredible displacement test. Nice mat too! Is there a way to get rid of the “seem” running down the link? Is that from displacement or the mat?
I suppose I need to check out what this water level thing is.
the seam is caused by the fact that the chain is made of 2 objects, one “belt” and a copy with flipped normals.
2d or 3d displace? btw. great job.
Great work.
I would like try it out but I’m currently running Max 7 and can’t open a Max 8 file. This may be asking a lot but any chance of posting it as a Max 7 file? Will this approach even work with Max 7?
Thx.
its not a matter of the max version.
unfortunately there is no way for me to save it as R7.
but the scene is so basic: extrude a spline, clone it, flip the normals of the clone, assign a 3d vray-displacement to both using the bw-image, adjust the tiling as u wish - ready.
Excellent! Thanks for sharing your work!
Thanks. Will give it a try.
that’s just the dogs mate…to create that from a bitmap…sigh