Baking displacement maps into mesh
Oso3D
Posts: 15,056
Ok, so... any takers?
What apps out there (ideally free or cheap) can take a displacement map on a figure and use it to distort and save out a mesh without changing the nature of the mesh.
I think someone mentioned Blender, but I loathe Blender, so unless it's a _very_ simple process, no thanks.
I tried Carrara, but Carrara, for some reason, insists on converting the quad mesh to tri mesh when applying displacement. (I tried 'untriangulate' but it did nothing) Close... so close, but sad trombone.
I have Hexagon, but haven't tried it yet.
Anyone?
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Look into vector displacement. I know mudbox can utilize these maps. I think I've seen zbrush utilizing them, but I don't remember if it's a current feature or from their summit on new features coming to the next version.
It's basically like using a "stamp" and moving geo based on a certain type of height data. Now, mudbox doesn't have any sort of dynamic topology, so I know it'll work without adding any geo.
Maya apparently also has a displacement to mesh option, but I'm not sure what the results are as far as triangulation/adding geo.
I was fearfull looking at the price of Mudbox... but $10/month isn't bad! Whew. I'll try the free trial and see if it does what I need.
Trying Mudbox, can't for the life of me figure out how to properly import textures and the UV meshes are all on top of one another. (And the 'help' I've found from searches has been utterly confusing)
Ah well, maybe something else will come around.
Figured it out (I had foolishly had the export collapse all tiles, well, duh).
It looks like all the cgi developers are like 'you want to go from a displacement map to a mesh? What, are you stupid?'
Guess I am. ;)
Displacement baking makes sense for Iray, considering how heavily it taxes the render engine (at least compared to normal/bump).
Take displacement map into image editing program, flip it vertically, save with a new name. load object into z-brush, load flipped map into z-brush, set map as mask, invert mask if needed, use deformations (don't remeber which one off the top of my head, inflate probably) to pop out the design.
Heh, can I borrow a grand for zbrush? :)
Yeah... it's a bit pricey ain't it..
I'd go for Zbrushcore, but it's still decent change while leaving me unsure it could actually do many of the things I'd want Zbrush for. (I realize there's a comparison chart, but without experience with zbrush it's hard to know how important missing features are)
Mudbox uses a multi tile type of naming. Set any images you're importing up like so:
Texturename_u1_v1.png (or tga, tiff, etc)
Texturename_u2_v1.png
Etc.
When you import via the paint tab (right click list area > import), select the proper channel and it should load them in across all udims if named properly. What I personsonally do is add the letter of the map type to the end of the texture name, like texturenameD_u1_v1, texturenameS_u1_v1, etc. That way I know better which maps go to which slots.
This bit I forgot Mudbox even had, as I haven't used Mudbox in ages. To use your pre-baked displacement map, go up to UVs & Maps > Sculpt Using Map > New Operation. Choose your mesh, plug in your displacement map. You may need to try a few times changing the Map Space setting to see what works best for the map you're using.
From there, be sure your sculpt layer strength is set to full, and you can resave your obj and you'll have a morph.
Hi William,
you opened a very interesting topic over here.
Perhaps did you see, that I ran into big trouble with displacement and iRay, too.
For some vehicles I like to show the profiles of the tires highly detailed with displacement. So I heavily have to increase the sub-dividing for displacement.
But for some reason, the latest DAZ (iRay) version limits the sub-dividing at a way too low limit. And it seems to apply the sub-D on all over the mesh, although I only need and defined it on the single surface (rubber of the tires): What also is a waste of memory.
It would be a great idea to manipulate the vehicle that way, that at the end the highly detailed structure of the tires could be baken into geometry.
btw:
If you want some textures to be modified/manipuöated, you can send them to me. I own a Paint Shop like program to perform all possible manipulations.
@AndyS for iray displacement, don't use the geo level subdivision. Use the texture subdivision on the material zone.
that's exactly what I did.
And until some days before, I believed into the same as you.
But I had to learn (post from Richard Haseltine and own experiment), that DAZ ever sub-divides all surfaces, although you specified it only on one specific surface.
I didn't find the mechanism - does it take the highest SubD value, the latest changed, ... or what :-?
Hm. I'll have to dig into that myself then. The only items I've got that use it have one material zone to begin with.
I have those vehicles like the WW2 Jeep and the Excavator. Those have a lot of different surface zones in one geometry unit.
I applied the Displ. SubD to a very different surface and also found my tires sub-divided, although there I used the value 0.
Strange:
Up to 4.9.2.70 that wasn't any problem. But 4.9.3.166 suddenly limits, because of a possible high memory occupation.
Those users with memory issues (usage of "small" GPU-cards) should better use the product "Scene Optimizer", instead of blocking necessary detailing.
maybe take the messy Carrara mesh minus the eye, mouth parts add a smoothing modifier to you figure and collide it with it hide the carrara mesh and export the base for a morph loader obj
Yeah, it took me a little to figure out the mudbox maps, but I did. One big mistake was that I had exported the initial object with tile collapse checked, which... is dumb and made things harder.
Oh my flippin gad, that did it perfectly!!!!!
Thank you SO MUCH, Vaskania!
Sounds like you have it solved but just to throw another tool in the toolbox you can do this with Houdini. There's a sample scene here https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/16579/ I think the intersting thing about how it does it is that it is using the shader builder to create a shader that displaces the geometry but instead of the shader writing out pixels to a render surface it writes the displacement back to the base geometry. This means you can use Houdini to do cool things like procedurally generating and editing geometry with shaders.
What's the easiest (and cheapest) way to convert displacement maps and/or HD details into normal maps?
marble: I don't know if it's the best, but I've had great results with Substance Painter. Which is $20/month until you hit $150 (or you can buy it outright), also has 30 day free trial
There's a specific 'bake high polygon to current surface' Normal thingie, and it has a nice combination of Normal + Height channel. Height channel is a HD heightmap that you can paint or generate, and then it outputs a normal map that combines normals + height, and then a separate normal and height map.
I find the output Height map is perfect for displacement, and the combined Normal_OpenGL map has incredible detail.
XNormal (free) for HD details to normal, for displacement map to normal there is a free plug-in for Photoshop by Nvidia that does it, don't know what (if any) other programs it'll work with though.
And here's the result. If I DO manage to become a PA and get access to HD morphs, that way is laid out. But even without it, it's a good combo, particularly being able to move the overall shape and then finetune details is very handy.
Normal, morph, both.
SP and Photoshop are outside of my budget at the moment. I have XNormal but I've had no luck with it. It will work for a single map (head or torso or whatever) but I can't get it to work for the whole figure. The thing that bugs me is that the HD details don't transfer to some (all?) geografts (the 3feetwolf gens, for example). That results is a ridge around the geograft edge if the figure has HD details (such as Zev0's ageing morphs or vascularity).
Is there an easy/cheap way to convert uv maps to the tile format (udimm?) that Mudbox uses? Genesis 3 is doable, but I tried to do stuff with Daz Horse and can't manage to avoid maps all stacked together.
Blender is the cheapest way. There's a few handy buttons to make it easier. If you feel like tackling blender, then I can go into how more in depth. I may already have some objs from Genesis and Genesis 2 I've already done where I converted them to UDIM myself.
I figured out how to do it using Carrara. Annoying and inelegantly, but hey.
Of course, limited by only morphing Base resolution, but it's a start.
Manipulating the uvs shouldnt require morphing at all, if all you wanted to do was convert stacked uvs to udim. o_O
No, I mean the overall point of all of this, which is to create morphs.
(right now, going SP2 to make cool displacement and normal maps, then use all the mess above to make a basic morph which is all that is permitted to enhance normal map)