Highpoly renders, Displacement or Other Methods?

spacemonkey

I've been trying to do some renders of my highpoly meshes recently. Obviously anything I make in the package (max) is going to be easily renderable. The Trick is when I have a heavily detailed mesh in Mudbox that I want to bring into max.
I've experimented with breaking it down into chunks to get it into max- using the bounding box trick. Then I've being use the mootools trial, and optimizing the chunks.. so with all the exporting and optimizations its time consuming.. but works.
I've also started to experiment with displacement maps. It's not something that I have any familiarity with but I am finding moderate success. Requires uvs on your low mesh and the rendering can be a slow at a good resolution. Also any mistakes or issues and theres no easy fixes that I know of ;(

So what do other people do? Suggestions?

Mongrelman

Best to use a displacement map for the main shape and a bump/normal for the wee details. From my own experiments, using a displacement map for microdetails is just not worth it. Though I've not used a renderman renderer, which apparently handle displacement very well.

You might want to bake a bump/normal map from the highest level onto a mid level mesh, so you just import the mid poly, plop that on and that should be it.

CheeseOnToast

What Lupus said If you can generate a 32-bit floating point displacement map, it saves a lot of headaches. I don't know the technical details, but I do know that you'll automatically get the right amount of bump/recess with this kind of map, at least in Maya. 16 bit or lower require a bunch of jigging about with alpha gain and alpha offset to get the depth right.

Mongrelman

Also you can try importing your high res mesh, and then run it through a polygon reduction tool. I've done some tests with XSI's and it seemed to be pretty good. You should be able to strip 4 million down to about 700k (maybe less) and have it look identical (might want to try a few different things). Easier to render and faster response in the program, which I'm guessing is all you are after.