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Bake 16 or 32 bit displacement in Maya?

Anyone know how to do it?

I've got 2008 and 2012 if that helps.

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  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    It's been a while since I used it, but I think it's under Windows > Setting/Preference > Preference > Rendering > 32bit?

    Also, I think the TIF format for Maya is automatically 32 bit?

    If not, I know that you can use the custom Material to render, if you tell it to use a Displacement shader, although I'm not sure how to setup it correctly.

    EDIT: You should try bake it with Alpha enabled as Luminance, I think this was what forces it to be spat out as 32bit.
  • Ark
  • EarthQuake
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    Ace-Angel wrote: »
    It's been a while since I used it, but I think it's under Windows > Setting/Preference > Preference > Rendering > 32bit?

    Also, I think the TIF format for Maya is automatically 32 bit?

    Can't find that in the prefs menu, and tiff is 8bit by default for me....
    If not, I know that you can use the custom Material to render, if you tell it to use a Displacement shader, although I'm not sure how to setup it correctly.
    This is beyond my maya knowledge too =(
    EDIT: You should try bake it with Alpha enabled as Luminance, I think this was what forces it to be spat out as 32bit.
    Do you know how to do that? Is it something I can do from transfer maps?
    Ark wrote: »

    Looks like this just goes over baking a disp and rendering in maya, thanks though.
  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    Luminance should be under "Something" Common Output > Bake Alpha > Luminance or something like that, sorry cannot recall it correctly.

    I think it also has a mess of it's own with Mental Ray needing enabling.

    I'll check real quick and see how Custom Shaders work...

    EDIT: What about EXR file? Do they bake out in 32bit?

    EDIT2: Well, this is stupid, seems like AO can be baked out in 32bit, but not Displacement? Maybe see and try that? They could have screwed up naming terms?

    Quick picture of the two things that might help?
    1YWuw.jpg
  • kylehug
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    I thought I'd verify for others who arrive at this thread that baking out the image as EXR in Transfer Maps works to get out a 32 bit Displacement map.

    For me, the height was stored in the alpha channel while rgb is saved out as black. I also had the Rendering preferences set to "32-bit floating point (HDR)" as suggested by Ace-Angel earlier, so if you still get an 8-bit image, you may also need to do that step.

    Cheers :poly121:
  • Tadao215
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    Tadao215 polycounter lvl 13
    Thanks for sharing! I was having the same issue
  • Polynaught
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    Polynaught polycounter lvl 11
    Hey there,

    the *.exr format has worked for me once to get a nice displacement gradient. But now that I am trying to do the exact same thing again I get an EXR that has almost no contrast and is nearly all gray.
    Only way so far to "remap" the low values (Level adjustment in PS could not catch any reasonable values from the histogram) is to scale the highpoly mesh before baking.
    Are there any other methods inside Maya to push the values of the EXR to use the whole spectrum of colors available? Currently I've set Maximum value to 0.0000 ...
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