Displacement Experiments in Carrara

Headwax

Hya stezza mentioned nurbs the other day so I went looking for a free greeble generator but found this instead

A free displacement map generator program . https://windmillart.net/?p=jsplacement

Thought it may be of interest. Puts out 8k images (?)  for neat displacements for cities and light maps etc.

The worked up image uses either Philemeno's Phong Displacement mapping, or Digital Carver Eric's anything grooves with some help distrubuting geometry via Sparrowhawkes's new plug in for distributing objects on a mesh.

The lights are from a JS placement light map that I used to distribute globes on in the texture channel of the distribution shader.

 

 

 

Other randoms follow. One of them has a terrain shader in the colour part of the shader. The js program also puts out colour and normal maps to suite the displacment maps. 

 

 

 

Diomede

Thanks for reporting these experiments and results.  Look amazing.  

Headwax

Thanks Diomede, I thought it was worth sharing, I was amazed at the detail you can get. Tweaking the carrara native settings gives quite a fast render time.

I tried exporting the displaced obj and reimporting then adding another layer of displecement but that killed the machine ;)

One thing I couldnt figure out was, when using a terrain shader I couldnt get a brick pattrern on the verticals - any clues?

Greymom

Many thanks for this info!

Steve K

Very impressive.

Headwax

thanks SteveK et Greymom.

There are other pics here (not by me) of what can be done with this one.

https://www.pinterest.com.au/carlrive/jsplacement/

 

lots of tuts on video too

Headwax

 

another play with a skull depth map placed over the displacement map



 

Stezza

head wax_carrara said:

Hya stezza mentioned nurbs the other day so I went looking for a free greeble generator but found this instead

A free displacement map generator program . https://windmillart.net/?p=jsplacement

Thought it may be of interest. Puts out 8k images (?)  for neat displacements for cities and light maps etc.

The worked up image uses either Philemeno's Phong Displacement mapping, or Digital Carver Eric's anything grooves with some help distrubuting geometry via Sparrowhawkes's new plug in for distributing objects on a mesh.

The lights are from a JS placement light map that I used to distribute globes on in the texture channel of the distribution shader.

 

 

 

Other randoms follow. One of them has a terrain shader in the colour part of the shader. The js program also puts out colour and normal maps to suite the displacment maps. 

 

 

 

interesting stuff that 

Headwax

thanks stezza :) presently rendering out the skull one placed in the displacment channel of a terrain - looks good - much more interesting than the usual terrain

 

Headwax

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

used displacement maps with terrains - some postwork

Bunyip02

head wax_carrara said:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

used displacement maps with terrains - some postwork

"Groovy" looking work, very nice !!!

Diomede

Terrific experiments.  Tried any with fluidos?

UnifiedBrain

head wax_carrara said:

 

 

This is an awesome thread you have started, HW.  However, I am not exactly understanding how you are getting these amazing results.  Any chance you can give a (brief) step by step?

Headwax

thanks Bunyip, Ted et UB :) Groovy indeed.!

@Diomede - sorry havent had a chance to use Fluiodos recently - though Iam enamoured of it!!

Ub - ah am away from carrara computer

Basically I dragged in a standard landscape from the browser - one that had a grovy texture

In another carrara file I rendered out a depth pass of a skull - then inverted it to flip the tones

I pasted that over the js tool displacement map and adjusted the opacity to let a little of the original map show through

In the terrain's shader I went to the displacement settings in the shader room

I brought in the displacement maop I had made - its 8k so very detailed and I think that helps

In the displacement shader window over on the section with the tick box for using subdivision I adjusted the left hand slider to about a third of the way forward (can't recall what iyt is called).

I normally use the right hand slider which is set at '2' and has a little warning on it - but I left this at 2 -

I think not changing this makes a big difference to render times - using the left hand slider seemed to do the job fine.

I  used the same displacement map texture as a driver to scatter the trees in a replicator 

Tips -

1)at first I couldnt see the terraina s they were too big so I adjusted the minimum distance thing in the camera parameters and made it as big as I could - that solved that

2) I couldn't move the camera fast enough to make any difference to the field of view etc - so I made the camera Huge and that fixed that

3) if you want to export an object with displacement applied you have to make the displacement visable in the 3d view - other wise the dispalcement doent get baked into the exported object

-doing this means you can add another layer of displcament - but that crashed my machine

4) adding Digital Carvers anything grooves on top of displacement in the shader room hung my machine

 

Postwork - I used Ron's brushes to paint in the dead trees and the waterfall - added a shadow style to the waterfall to mak it sit better on the rocks.

I used object pass to isolate the background terrains and drop their contrast and make them bluer - but in retrospect I should have made the detail on them smaller to give a s-ense of receding space

Some of the shadows on the terrain were too dark so i got the textures back by using a diffuse (?) pass as a layer as it doesnt show shadows (?)

The sky was one of my old photographs.

Topaz Impression to add a bit of messiness at end.

 

Hope that is of some interest :) 

 

 

UnifiedBrain

Thanks HW.  I will give it a go.

Headwax

UnifiedBrain said:

Thanks HW.  I will give it a go.

Pleasure UB  - I think the displacement maps add a bit more interest to carrara terrains.

I see there is a displacement thing in the terrain 'modeller' - havnt played with that yet.

also the js software puts out a normal map - so it would be interesting to work that into the terrain shader somehow

there is also a way to add to add your own 'sprites' to the js tool which could be interesting? maybe for adding scattered houses ?? 

 looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

 

Bunyip02

Would make for a nice base of a future city, might have to investigate further....

Headwax

hope you do \= really nice images here https://www.behance.net/gallery/59071691/NDStry

also be interesting seeing them on human figures too

UnifiedBrain

I love greebles, even though I didn't even know what they were called before I started Carrara.  This render from PhilW (Challenge #27) really inspired me.

 

But I still didn't understand how greebles were generated until recently.  And then, thanks to HW, the playbox got a lot bigger when he pointed out the power of JSplacement.

My renders below using JSplacement maps in Carrara are nothing special.  I just spent an hour or two playing.  Still, they look reasonable, especially considering how little of time they took.  Thanks, HW!

 

Headwax

Wonderful to see these UB. That first night scene is a humdinger. So is the one in the current challenge. And how smart is PhilW ? ;) Lucky to have him.