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Darkside 101 posts
Im currently trying to create a mountain valley landscape using displacement mapping in Maya, however im running into the problem of the polygons not raising themselves up in the render preview and when i convert displacement map to polygons. The geometry converts itself into polygon triangles when i try to convert in a way that would look like it would look nice if raised, however it's not doing so
Any suggestions?
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zachm 1,230 posts
for your problem with previewing displacement, you'll want to open up your hypershade, and go to create=>general Utilities=> height Field This will create a height field node in your hypershade. Now take your texture in the hypershade and middle-drag it to the heght field node, and select other when the connections pop up. This will open up the connection editor where you can link the out alpha from your image map to the displacement of the height field node. This will create a peice of non-renderable geometry in your scene that you can scale to the proper size and adjust the resolution of to match that of your geometry. There are some other pointers I have but I'll wait till you get this one working. Let me know if none of this makes sense man.
-Z
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Darkside 101 posts
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zachm 1,230 posts
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Darkside 101 posts
This is what I got so far.
I had to take a screenshot instead of a render lol, but yea im guessing its not rendering properly because it's almost 1 million poly's haha. Im going to go through the things you said in your above post and hopefully be able to lower the polycount and make it look a bit nicer and smoother.
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zachm 1,230 posts
yeah dude, you could get the same result but better using the approximation editor and a plane at like 20x20 polys. And it's fast as heck too!
-Z
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Darkside 101 posts
Little update.
Lots of thanks to zachm for all the help
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hype 2,964 posts
how many polygons is that? (so we can compare to the "before" shot)
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Darkside 101 posts
102912 poly's now. Quite a nice change coming down from almost 1 million polygons
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zachm 1,230 posts
That still seems like a lot of polygons to me. I could see it at like 1000 if you keep tweaking your approximation editior settings. It looks great though, compared to that one from the earlier post. Was that first one a convert to polys mesh? or was that a height field?
-Z
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Darkside 101 posts
Yea the first one was convert to poly mesh
This is what I got so far. Having a little bit of trouble with the lighting, I don't think it looks right yet, so im very open to suggestions on it. Im also having trouble figuring out how to turn a directional light into a lens flare, so that I can put in my sun like how i drew it in this pic.
Update
I fixed the light direction from my desired like source I think, and added some color and more texture to the actual moon surface.
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MikeWilson 638 posts
Directional light doesn't have a flare to it, because it is a light with no beginning and no end, you can try an area light, spotlight, and Omni would work too.
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Darkside 101 posts
Alright, thanks a lot.
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MikeWilson 638 posts
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Darkside 101 posts
This is the finished render that I handed in for my assignment. Teacher liked it a lot, though im not quite satisfied with it yet, so i'll keep making it better and updating.
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MikeWilson 638 posts
haha man, thats a bit frustrating for such a small part, you could have rendered a very accurate landscape in terragen in minutes. I like the ship* and the robot though man, very cool.
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Darkside 101 posts
Hehe yea, im going to be doing more with the displacement terrain in other renders, just for this one it only takes up a very small part. Im also planning on doing some work with Jupiter. Im going to try and give it a glowing halo kind of thing with an outer atmosphere layer.
