Parallax Maps in Maya 8.5?

Steve Schulze

After spending half of today downloading redundant plugins and shaders, searching through countless websites and bugging people on my Steam and MSN list I give up. What kind of voodoo do I need to display Parallax Maps in Maya? I've gotten the regular normal map to show up with no problems.
I've found a variety of shaders and plugins for older versions of Maya and MR but nothing suitable for the 8.5 addition.

edwardE

I think you can do this with a CGfx or HLSL shader - I've only barely poked with them, but maybe that could give you enough to research up on?

MoP

I thought Brice Vandemoortele's shader did that. Do a quick search around this forum, he was updating it quite recently.

Allert

http://mentalwarp.com/~brice/download/GenericBRDF_2_BETA.cgfx

Eric Chadwick

Brice added Relief Mapping, much sexier than Parallax. Apparently the height map has to be inverted (black = high) and put into the alpha channel of the normal map...
http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=821862&postcount=85

bugo

Turtle has a shader that can display parallax very well. When turtle installed, use the hardware material, depth has to be into the normalmap alpha.

Steve Schulze

Do you have a link to Turtle?

I had a bit of a play with Brice's shader. Its pretty nifty. I'm still not get much in the way of depth on my normal map, but at least I can see that the relief/parallax thing is working. Sort of.

Thanks for the help. And props to Brice.

Eric Chadwick

I haven't used it, but I just added the link to the tao wiki, so here it is... http://www.illuminatelabs.com/turtle/trial

Brice Vandemoortele

Could I have more feedback on this please? ("sort of" ?)
post screenshots or even maps in png and we might help

cheers