In this Monday Movie I show you how to tweak mental ray displacement settings in 3dsMax. Learn how to speed up your renders by approximating displacement more roughly, or really juice your displacement maps by getting sub-pixel displacement!
Sorry about the lousy encoding, my computer’s been acting up something fierce these days. This weekend I’ll hopefully get a fresh install going and that’ll give me the edge on next week’s Monday Movie. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed those steampunk reference images!
By ekko February 5, 2009 - 9:54 am
Nifty tutorial, thanks. Hope you sort out your computer!
By Bluesummers February 6, 2009 - 1:10 am
Right on! I’m glad you liked it. I’m sure a reinstall will help with the movies- there’s something wrong with my encoder so it keeps crashing when I save. =P
By DarkBoost February 18, 2010 - 1:37 am
Nice tutorial… Would you know how to stop an object increasing in size when using a Displacement Map?
Example: http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/8342/examplek.jpg
I was under the impression that if an area was Black #000000 then it would not move when rendered, however this does not appear to be the case here!?
By Derek March 15, 2011 - 8:04 pm
I just wanted to say this was exactly what I was looking for. I have recently been using 3D displacement for details on my objects and bump/normal maps for surface bumps. What I was wondering is there a difference between the 3D displacement shader and mental ray’s standard displacement ?
By Mr. Bluesummers March 16, 2011 - 1:22 am
Thanks Derek; you rock! As far as I can tell, there’s very little difference between the two. The 3dsMax integration of mental ray probably passes in an ordinary displacement map from a Standard material in as the map wrapped in a mr displacement shader.
The reason you might pick the mr displacement shader over ordinary displacement is if
You needed the additional controls like separating extrusion length vs direction, or
You needed to override the displacement across several materials easily (via mental ray overrides).
I think I’ve got a tutorial about the mental ray 3d Displacement Shader for you also.
By Derek March 16, 2011 - 10:38 pm
Thanks! Yeah I’ve been using 3D displacement ever since I found your tutorial and this page explained exactly why the quality was so low… now I can fix that. Currently I am working on recreating the bullet from the opening scene of the movie Wanted…. there were supposed to be tutorials on it but I figured hey, I’m competent enough I’ll just do it myself…. the most time consuming part of it so far has been actually designing the graphic to be displaced on the surface of the bullet. Who knew?
By Theo February 14, 2012 - 3:05 pm
Great. Needed this to go with what I learnt on your other 3d disp tutorial. Thanks. 🙂