In this tutorial I'm going to show how to use v-ray displacement. So, to start
off I made a little piece of molding because this is where I use displacement
most often. So, picture this as a crown mold or something I went into ZBrush and
did a little carving out of a plane that's the easiest way to make
displacement maps if you just go into sorry not ZBrush Mudbox
but either one works create a basic plane and just start carving and I just
made this little displacement map it doesn't really represent anything it's
kind of a leaf or some sort of pattern and I've got it mapped onto this piece
of molding that fits this profile right here if you go into my materials you can
see that I have I have this map in here
if you view the image you can see my displacement map I've left some black on
the top and on the bottom so that I can put that on the parts of the mold that I
don't want to displace I if you're looking at the profile I only want this
pattern to be going in this area here so the rest I left black so it doesn't move
when I displace it and I just put this in the diffuse mount because I'm gonna
turn it off anyway so what I'll do is leave it there and all and I'll show the
standard map in viewport so that I can see it here but then I'll just turn it
off because I'm not actually going to want
that as my diffuse but I do want to see it important thing to remember here is
when you have your displacement map applied you don't want to use real-world
texture when you're using v-ray displacement so I set it up to tile ten
times I I set it to tile vertically one point four times so that it would fit
properly into that area that I want it to displace in if I put it at one it
would bleed into some of the other areas and so I just fit it with this until I
get it in the right spot you can see I've done some offsetting
um important one is this one again this is just to get it in the proper spot on
the mold so that only that part will displace I also had to rotate it 270
degrees in this again it's just a basic spline swept along a line so the
important thing with the sweep is to
make sure that it's generating mapping coordinates but not real-world map size
so you want that on so that this map will follow along that sweep just like
it's supposed to and this way if you wanted to make your spline do something
different like I took that spline
and adjusted it
you'll see that my my leaf texture will still map properly
around it that's a nice thing about sweeps for molding especially because
your mattress will follow that and it's kind of built into this week just like
in a spline okay so now let's look at how to actually displace this you've got
a sweep setup you take a v-ray displacement modifier I usually try to
use 2d mapping because the pre sampling of it is much much much faster than 3d
mapping usually especially if you have a large area that's being displaced 2d
mapping will work fine here and then you take that diffuse map and actually
instance it right into the map for the displacement
if we look at some of these other settings you can see filter blur the
amount that it's going to displace so that means that pure white on my map is
going to be one inch out from that molding it's probably a little bit much
let's try 2.5 this molding is only six inches tall you can shift it can up the
resolution to make it more precise another thing to remember is when you
make these maps you want to save them as 16-bit Tiff's at least because the
higher bit image will be a more accurate displacement now when we got this set up
like this it should be about ready to go remember the important thing was to use
in this case 2d mapping and no real-world scale let's see what we get
when we render
okay with a standard render and default lights it looks like that it is working
looks a little funky though so let me try to adjust some things so it'll read
better and we'll see what we get okay when I set this up on a little scene it
looks a little better I still have some weird things going on and the
displacement doesn't look as nice as I want to you can see I have some things
displacing on the bottom here and that's because my map didn't have enough black
space to cover up all the way down to this bottom so it's actually starting to
repeat right here so you see some things starting to displace so I'm not going to
go back and change that right now but I'm going to adjust the displacement
settings to get this kind of leaf thing looking better because right now it just
looks like a blob but you can see that the displacement is working let's go
look at some of the settings see if we can get it to work better
one thing we can do is make the the map
raise my map turn down the bar here
in our
resolution will double that excuse me
and we'll see what that gets okay we're turning the blur down turn the precision
up I get a little bit crisper displacement going on still not great
keep in mind that when you're doing this a lot depends on what your image looks
like and mine isn't that great it's not really high-resolution and I think it
was compressed at some point too so you want to try to avoid that you want a
higher resolution save it as a as a higher bit image 16 or 32 bit that way
you'll get much more precise displacements and mine's got some kind
of funky things going on I just did a quick sculpting in Mudbox and exported
it as a displacement map obviously you can spend a lot of time in Mudbox making
a very nice displacement the last thing I'm going to do is just turn up the
amount in my displacement here so you can so it will read much more pronounced
just to kind of see what kind of effects we can get
okay beery didn't like that last renter I did so it crashed my 3d studio max but
um the last thing I want to show you is that if you noticed in my rendering
there wasn't wasn't really showing these these little details in here I was
mostly showing this bright white and that's because I had when I sculpted it
I sculpted these in too low of relief so they didn't really show up unless I
displaced it too much so keep that in mind when you're doing this you can go
in here and change the levels of this image but then all this solid white is
going to be perfectly flat when it displaces you'll lose some of those
details in there so remember black is going to move zero and white will move
the maximum whatever you set that at anyway I hope this was helpful remember
the important things are sculpt sculpt from a plane in Mudbox export as a
displacement map use that displacement map with the v-ray displacement modifier
don't use real world and just map it onto those sweeps map it onto those
splines so that it fits right into the space you want displaced and then tweak
those v-ray displacement settings until they give you the effect you need this
is the easiest easiest technique out there for making things like crown
moldings and other types of moldings hope this was helpful thanks