Displacment

I have having an issue with displacement in the latest build of V-Ray under 3D Max Design 2011.

I have a foundation that tapers in so I extruded a line, grabbed the top corners, and pulled the top back several inches. When I apply my V-Ray Displacement the displacement seems to go up and not out.

Am I doing something wrong?

are you using 2d or 3d mapping?

I am using 3D, but I guess I can try 2D and see if it is any better.

I tried 2d and it worked much better, but I can’t connect the corners like I can with 3D. Here is what I am getting with 3D…

same geometry except I picked 2d for the displacement type

As far as I understand Vray displacement works off surface normals…so it is very important that your normals are correct.
If it’s not doing what you want because of the normals then you could try using the vector displacement as this way you can control which direction the displacement goes.

But I may add that for such simple geometry you would be better off modeling the geometry. You’ll get exactly what you want with massivly less polygons & I’m sure you could have modeled it in the same amount of time that you’ve struggled to achieve it with displacement & not succseeded.

Hope this helps

Isn’t there a way to display the normal direction? I looked, but I can’t find anything. These model I get are usually from Revit, which are typically poorly modeled.

there certainly is!!:slight_smile:

if you select the faces on an editable-mesh object you have a small checkbox to show normals.
[it’s in the first panel called selection and you can adjust the scale of the lines ]
what you will get is a blue line showing the direction of the normal

if your object is an editable-Poly simply put an temporary edit- mesh modifier on it to check this out as it doesn’t have this option with the editable-poly

this is an invaluable tool when it comes to working with bad models made from architects.

all the best

Here is a snapshot of it

Holy Cow! I have looked for this forever, almost a year, thanks!