How do you use the new displacement mapping feature in 2014?

[Eric Nickerson]

How do you use the new displacement mapping feature in 2014?

Also, are there new manual pdfs to download somewhere?

[Dave Donley]

Hello Lealaps:

All Bump shaders have a displacement parameter that adds displacement to the bumps.

Custom RW Options has a new option to turn on Displacement Mapping in the rendering, and Final Quality has it on by default. There is a Quality setting for it in the Custom RW Options too.

The Detail setting in the bump shaders is there to control the amount of detail shown for that texture to start with, the combination of Detail and Quality sets the amount of subdividing that will be done on the object in order to show the displaced bumps. For example some textures might need High Detail all the time (little bumps to simulate grass is one example), others can be OK with Detail set to Low all the time.

Using the Noise shader can produce cleaner bumps than using an image.

Attached is an example of using the Very High detail setting with the Noise bump shader to approximate grass. Very High detail should be reserved for close objects - displacement mapping can take awhile to pre-process and render.

[Eric Nickerson]

Thanks Dave! Excellent explanation and cool grass texture.

[PVA - Admin]

You can find the latest iteration of the manuals inside the Vectorworks installation folder, under:

Mac:

/Applications/Vectorworks 2014/VWHelp/Additional Documentation

Windows:

Program Files (Or Program Files x86)/Vectorworks 2014/VWHelp/Additional Documentation

I am not sure if they describe the creation of Displacement Mapped textures, but we will definitely be adding a few 101s on that and the Image Brick textures to the Vectorworks Service Select video library soon.

[M5d]

Is this feature likely to exacerbate the ongoing rendering/memory problem?

[Dave Donley]

Not at all M5d, all the processing is performed by CineRender.

[M5d]

Thanks Dave.

Did they remove sleep from your employment contract for the 2014 release period?

[Dave Donley]

Haha no, but I want to make sure you all get up to speed with 2014 OK.

[Neil Barman]

Jim,

Would it be reasonable to use a displacement mapped textured to portray board & batten siding?

Also, do you have any sense as to when the 101's are coming to VSS?

Thanks,

-Neil

[PVA - Admin]

As long as you have or can make a proper displacement map, yes, you would be able to show siding fairly well.

There are a couple places you can get highly detailed pre-configured image based textured paired with their bump or displacement maps already, like this one:

http://resources.maxwellrender.com/search.php#page=1&mode=1&search=siding&v1=0&v2=0&tipo=

Not sure exactly when on the VSS content but it may be awhile, I know videos on Worksheets and a few other things are coming first.

Edited January 17, 2014 by JimW

[Neil Barman]

Thanks Jim. Good to know that Displacement Maps are further down in the VSS 101 queue.

I'll poke around to see if I can find a good board & batten texture & bump map. If I don't find out, at least it would be one of the easier kinds to practice making.

-Neil

[Andy Broomell]

What a great site, Jim! Thanks for the link!

[Amelia S]

Dave (or anyone else) -

I checked out your grass displacement file and it looks awesome!!

To implement it in my file, I tried first to mimic your texture's settings, and made sure my viewport had displacement mapping checked. When it didn't work, I copied the 3d polygon from your file and placed it in space in mine. When rendered in the same viewport, that 3d polygon shows correct displacement, but my ground surface (with the same texture) does not. Since my ground surface is an extrude, I tried fiddling with the map type in the extrude's OIP but to no avail. Any idea why the texture would render with displacement on one object and without on another?

Thanks!!

So excited by the prospect of attractive grass in our renderings!

Amelia

VW 2014

[PVA - Admin]

Could you post the extrude in a file by itself here? I can have a look.

[Amelia S]

Thanks Jim - Here it is with both the 3d polygon and the extruded ground surface.

[PVA - Admin]

This isnt functioning properly. It appears to reduce the intensity of the displacement relative to the size of the object, which should not be the case.

You should be able to see this if you reduce the size of the ground extrude significantly. When I create a new extrude just larger than the 3d poly and the test cube, it has significantly more displacement, but still not the identical displacement to the 3d poly, which it should.

It also appears to be affected by the shape of the ground extrude, over near the small rectangular notch along one edge, the displacement seems much stronger.

I do not believe you have done anything wrong here, I will submit this as an issue now and see if it can be sorted out.

[PVA - Admin]

Confirmed, the intensity of the displacement mapping is being affected by the size of the plane it is mapped to. this should not be the case. I will post if there are any updates.

This example image shows the intersection of 4 rectangular 3d polygons, all with the same texture and mapping settings, the only difference being the size of the 3d polys. As you can see, the displacement become less intense on the larger ones.

[Amelia S]

Interesting. I appreciate that!

How has everyone else gone about it that it happens to come out right? Would I need to recreate the texture? I assume others have had success with this?

[PVA - Admin]

I think for the larger object you could work around it for the time being by splitting the large surface up into multiple small squares.

For instance, you could take the small 3D poly that works properly and duplicate it in an array to create the "ground", then just group all of the pieces together for easy movement.

This should have the same visual appearance without having to mess with special versions of the texture for each size of object.

[rDesign]

Jim-

Do you know if this bug regarding the 'intensity of displacement mapping relative to applied object size' has been fixed in Vw2015?

Thanks.

[PVA - Admin]

Its been submitted and acknowledged, but no change in status so far.

[zoomer]

Confirmed, the intensity of the displacement mapping is being affected by the size of the plane it is mapped to. this should not be the case. I will post if there are any updates.

This example image shows the intersection of 4 rectangular 3d polygons, all with the same texture and mapping settings, the only difference being the size of the 3d polys. As you can see, the displacement become less intense on the larger ones.

Isn't that related general to the way textures are mapped to faces ?

As I miss the simple texture by size mapping mode.

F.e. if I set a texture size according to an image, f.e. a masonry photo

with 4 bricks in size, to 1 m length and tiling on.

If that would be possible for images in VW,

that would solve the problem above with a displacement texture too.

Edited March 18, 2015 by zoomer

[PVA - Admin]

You should be able to set the images size manually via "Set by Image" in the bottom right of the edit texture window, do you not have that option? Or am I misunderstanding which size setting you mean?

[zoomer]

I always set the size in the material editor for any reasons,

but when I rendered it size was ignored, at least not in scale.

I think the elements were solids, not meshes (?)

I tried then to go to the object settings and change from given

to any other texture mapping mode that could respect my

material size but was not successful.

[AlanW]

Hi,

I had trouble finding out how to do the displacement mapping so I have toyed with it and the attached my result which gives a bit of an overview in the first video and the second shows you how I did it.

Have fun

This one shows how I created the maps