something like this would be just prfect. have been trying it out i xsi and it is eliminating all the problems of overlaping displacement
sheck it out here: http://www.xsibase.com/forum/index.php?board=29;action=display;threadid=31878
best
/Daniel
Yeah, I have actually been thinking along the same lines; this is not terribly difficult to do either.
Best regards,
Vlado
-cool 8)
this is actually a very common practice with render man. Its called rib archives. And this is the idea exactly. To have this would be a dream 
Wait… Rib Archiving is like Vray Proxy… this is about have a base deformation object. THAT is very different. With this method you could use a base low res character that references a High res Z-Brush or Mudbox type model that deforms. That is huge. Unless Rib Archiving has changed I think it is for solid objects.
well I personally never worked with render man. But a colegue of mine did just recently. And he described their work flow as such:
They would build a low res/high res meshes, store the highres into rib archives then the lowres meshes would reference the highones at render time.
I think vray proxy is more close to render mans point cloud? maybe Im wrong. In any case this option would be super.
No, the rib archive is just like Vray Proxy. The low res is simply a place holder. What is unique of the XSI method is that is reference which is deformable. Big difference. For example at DD we used rib archives for the buildings during Day After Tomorrow. That would be a classic example. But in Maya we needed a representation of them so we had boxes that were replaced by the rib archive during render time.
right. I think they have stepped it up to deformable geo now too…