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Question about displacement maps

interpolator
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Larry interpolator
So why not model the thing instead of using map? Doesnt it generate the vertices in rendering or real time? Is it THAT profitable in terms of memory? Or do they use it only in specific scenarios?what are these?

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  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    you cant animate an multimillion poly char... you need to use dispmaps...
    smae goes for environment stuff like stones... you simply cant load that much geo into max... 
    the poly needs to be created during rendertime...
  • Obscura
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    Obscura grand marshal polycounter
    In a real time application, usually adaptive tessellation is used. What this means, it that it will only tessellate certain things inside a radius from the camera, so further things stays lowpoly as long as needed. This means only a small portion of the scene will be tessellated all the time. Anything that needs to be, because its close to the player, he is probably looking at it. It will also try to keep the triangle size consistent. You'd also need to keep in mind that there needs to be some sort of a fallback for lower settings. If you just put the hp mesh straight, you won't be able to optimize it nicely, and you'd spend a lot of memory on loading the hp meshes directly. Tessellation alongside with displacement however, can be just toggled off.

    edit - another very important aspects mentioned by oglu. You can't unwrap, rig, animate a multimillion poly mesh.
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    oglu said:
    you cant animate an multimillion poly char... you need to use dispmaps...
    smae goes for environment stuff like stones... you simply cant load that much geo into max... 
    the poly needs to be created during rendertime...
    i thought that you dont use multimillion models and you just bake them to lower resolution. Same with rocks and environment. As for animation, i thought you animate the low poly and then render the high poly through subdivision modelling. No? It is interesting to hear that displacement maps are used for animation
    Thank you guys for taking the time to answer those questions to newbies :)
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    subD modeling is required to use dispmaps... but a subd only will just create the smooth limit surface no details at all...
    you need the dispmap to get the fine cracks from your highres sculpt...
  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666
    in this tutorial you can see the subD mesh (wireframe) which gets animated... and the displaced one for rendering...
    http://henningsanden.com/2013/02/27/zbrush-to-maya-displacement-map/
  • musashidan
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    musashidan high dynamic range
    Larry said:

      As for animation, i thought you animate the low poly and then render the high poly through subdivision modelling. No? It is interesting to hear that displacement maps are used for animation

    Every high-end CG hero character you've seen in practically every film will have painted/sculpted disp maps. But 'low-poly' isn't exactly that in VFX/film. The organised mesh will have a very dense topology to support complex rigging systems and will be using render-time subdivs to support the displacement mapping.
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    Larry said:

      As for animation, i thought you animate the low poly and then render the high poly through subdivision modelling. No? It is interesting to hear that displacement maps are used for animation

    Every high-end CG hero character you've seen in practically every film will have painted/sculpted disp maps.
    Does normal map count as a displacement map?
  • musashidan
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    musashidan high dynamic range
    Larry said:
    Larry said:

      As for animation, i thought you animate the low poly and then render the high poly through subdivision modelling. No? It is interesting to hear that displacement maps are used for animation

    Every high-end CG hero character you've seen in practically every film will have painted/sculpted disp maps.
    Does normal map count as a displacement map?
    No. A normal map is essentially a visual shading trick. Like a bump map. A displacement map is using values to drive actual deformation on the mesh. That is why it requires enough Geo to support the detail.
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    Larry said:
    Larry said:

      As for animation, i thought you animate the low poly and then render the high poly through subdivision modelling. No? It is interesting to hear that displacement maps are used for animation

    Every high-end CG hero character you've seen in practically every film will have painted/sculpted disp maps.
    Does normal map count as a displacement map?
    No. A normal map is essentially a visual shading trick. Like a bump map. A displacement map is using values to drive actual deformation on the mesh. That is why it requires enough Geo to support the detail.
    ok thanks! I've seen your tutorials on youtube as well :)
  • musashidan
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    musashidan high dynamic range
    No prob. Hope the tuts are somewhat useful. :)
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    No prob. Hope the tuts are somewhat useful. :)
    Yes but please, in the future talk a bit louder and more energetic! The tutorials provide really good information but you need to be high in caffeine in order to pay attention otherwise you might fall asleep.
  • Obscura
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    Obscura grand marshal polycounter
    Depends on how bad you want to know something...
  • EarthQuake
    Larry said:
    No prob. Hope the tuts are somewhat useful. :)
    Yes but please, in the future talk a bit louder and more energetic! The tutorials provide really good information but you need to be high in caffeine in order to pay attention otherwise you might fall asleep.
    Ooof. Complaining about free tutorials, seriously? Artists are such entitled little shits these days, when I was learning 3D I had to experiment and research until I figured out how things work, now it's beyond the pale if the nearly endless free resources aren't authored to perfection.

    /old man rant
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    @Obscura and @EarthQuake

    Believe me i want to learn so bad but i cannot afford it. I also want to do this so bad that i will relocate anywhere in the world if i land a job.
    Does any negative comment come through as "complaining"? He also got my praise for doing such an amazing work but you do not comment on that. I love the work he does and i appreciate the time he puts in,but some facts are facts and if nobody tells him how can he become better on that?I assumed that he wants more people to view his tutorials. It was a reply on him hoping the tutorials were useful.
     @musashidan i'm sorry if this came out in a bad way, all i was trying to do is help back in anyway that an inexperienced person could.
  • musashidan
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    musashidan high dynamic range
    Thanks for the feedback. Good, bad, or indifferent, it's always welcome. A few points if I may.

    1 - I'm Irish, so by nature we don't ever 'Hollywood' it up. And I certainly won't be pretending to be 'more energetic' any       time soon.

    2 - I work 60 hours a week. Spend about 20 hours a week on personal work. And put these tuts together when I can. I appreciate that you've acknowledged that it takes a lot of time to make them. Take the 'Chemical Tank' asset series  for instance. It's about 8 hours long and was recorded/narrated/edited/uploaded, in real-time, in a single sitting. :) I had been up an entire day/night and at the computer the whole time. Energetic?  Plus it was on a rare Saturday that I had free. I could have spent that time drinking heavily but I'm dedicated like that. ;) 

    3 - years ago when I decided that I would self-learn to play Flamenco guitar I spent hours upon hours learning the fundamentals of the many strum-hand techniques, and the painful stretching excercises and fingering practice of the fret-hand. I was hopeless for many weeks. My hands were always sore, stiff, and fingertips bruised (and later calloused)
    At times I almost packed it in but, my love of Flamenco music and Paco DeLucia always drove me on. Many years later and I actually have a repetoire.  My point: having this solid foundation in the fundamentals, battling through those long, arduous hours of repetition payed off in the end. Those little breakthroughs in skill that you notice are golden.  With CG the same. The breakthrough being an obvious improvement with each completed project.

    4 - Read  @EarthQuake Oldman rant again. Learning CG back in the day in comparison to the staggering amount of resources available now.......It's almost funny......almost.

    So @Larry don't take it too personally. There are a lot of us here that have done the hard yards learning this stuff, over many years, and I've noticed a lot more threads pop up that feature - to quote Joe above - 'entitled little shits'. I'm not saying that's you, necessarily.  But please bear it in mind when trying to understand our reasoning for getting pissed off. Nobody said this was a learning path that was piss-easy. 

    The primary ingredient for progress/success......self-experimentation. In the spirit of the hacker, just get in there and tinker. Try things out. Press buttons. Break it. Fix it. Learn from  it.
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    Thanks for the feedback. Good, bad, or indifferent, it's always welcome. A few points if I may.

    1 - I'm Irish, so by nature we don't ever 'Hollywood' it up. And I certainly won't be pretending to be 'more energetic' any       time soon.

    2 - I work 60 hours a week. Spend about 20 hours a week on personal work. And put these tuts together when I can. I appreciate that you've acknowledged that it takes a lot of time to make them. Take the 'Chemical Tank' asset series  for instance. It's about 8 hours long and was recorded/narrated/edited/uploaded, in real-time, in a single sitting. :) I had been up an entire day/night and at the computer the whole time. Energetic?  Plus it was on a rare Saturday that I had free. I could have spent that time drinking heavily but I'm dedicated like that. ;) 

    3 - years ago when I decided that I would self-learn to play Flamenco guitar I spent hours upon hours learning the fundamentals of the many strum-hand techniques, and the painful stretching excercises and fingering practice of the fret-hand. I was hopeless for many weeks. My hands were always sore, stiff, and fingertips bruised (and later calloused)
    At times I almost packed it in but, my love of Flamenco music and Paco DeLucia always drove me on. Many years later and I actually have a repetoire.  My point: having this solid foundation in the fundamentals, battling through those long, arduous hours of repetition payed off in the end. Those little breakthroughs in skill that you notice are golden.  With CG the same. The breakthrough being an obvious improvement with each completed project.

    4 - Read  @EarthQuake Oldman rant again. Learning CG back in the day in comparison to the staggering amount of resources available now.......It's almost funny......almost.

    So @Larry don't take it too personally. There are a lot of us here that have done the hard yards learning this stuff, over many years, and I've noticed a lot more threads pop up that feature - to quote Joe above - 'entitled little shits'. I'm not saying that's you, necessarily.  But please bear it in mind when trying to understand our reasoning for getting pissed off. Nobody said this was a learning path that was piss-easy. 

    The primary ingredient for progress/success......self-experimentation. In the spirit of the hacker, just get in there and tinker. Try things out. Press buttons. Break it. Fix it. Learn from  it.
    thank you for the time you take to write these replies. I don't take it personally , i am not here to argue with anyone and i kinda felt bad that one thing i said came out perhaps in a negative way. I understand you guys didn't have youtube or many sites giving info on the subject but i dont think you had so many techniques to learn(am i wrong in this?) since the computer technology was not so advanced to support overcomplicated stuff. That said, i started on 2017 learning the art of 3d and when i thought it was only modeling, i came across 100 different things you need to make something new gen, like LOD's lightmaps etc and the level of painting that is needed to make it realistic (yes there are tools that make it easier, but still, more things to learn) All of these get me excited, not overwhelemd or frustrated.But don't say "back in the day we had to learn by ourselves" because the "newbies" are faced with different obstacles both in quality and in quantity and a high level of competition!
  • musashidan
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    musashidan high dynamic range
    Larry said:

    thank you for the time you take to write these replies. I don't take it personally , i am not here to argue with anyone and i kinda felt bad that one thing i said came out perhaps in a negative way. I understand you guys didn't have youtube or many sites giving info on the subject but i dont think you had so many techniques to learn(am i wrong in this?) since the computer technology was not so advanced to support overcomplicated stuff. That said, i started on 2017 learning the art of 3d and when i thought it was only modeling, i came across 100 different things you need to make something new gen, like LOD's lightmaps etc and the level of painting that is needed to make it realistic (yes there are tools that make it easier, but still, more things to learn) All of these get me excited, not overwhelemd or frustrated.But don't say "back in the day we had to learn by ourselves" because the "newbies" are faced with different obstacles both in quality and in quantity and a high level of competition!
    Well, you've missed out on all the fun of straight-ahead animating a walk cycle by directly manipulating manually selected groups of vertices, frame by frame.... :)

    Ye 'olde workflow consisted of:

    Modeling 
    Unwrapping
    Baking
    Texturing
    Rigging/skinning (when it was supported - see above)
    Animating
    And finally.....the hellish nightmare that was getting your assets in-engine....I shudder now to even think of this step.

    Sound familiar?

    Sub-d modeling has been around for decades. The only thing that's changed is that now there are endless resources on how to actually do it. Reading academic papers was actually a thing back then. 

    Building a head/body mesh from scratch when trying to create an anatomically correct model with muscle-flow topology was like a science. No sculpting/retopo for us poor bastards then. But we didn't complain as before us people had to build these models by stitching patch surfaces together! You should
    d look that one up.

    Unwrapping gets terrible press from beginners nowadays. You should have tried it when the tools were archaic, the algorithms in their infancy, and everything had to be planar mapped manually.

    Baking.....haha! This is still the number one issue in 2017. Back then it was the same deal.....minus the logical information widely available today. I was f##king terrified by Normal map baking for a very long and dark period....it was surely dark sorcery.

    Texturing was a LOT of trial and error. And a LOT less pixels.

    Rigging/Skinning was actually quote pleasant as the verts were sparse. :)

    Animating was the same deal as today. Again, minus the resources. 

    Exporting to engine....... I'm already starting to sweat just thinking about this one. As I said above: a hellish nightmare. Today it's basically click, click....in-engine.

    So, in conclusion I would say that people learning today have much more freedom to concentrate on the art side of things. Whilst there is certainly more tools/software to learn, a lot of those early technical barriers have been removed/solved. I still smile when I think of my own awestruck reaction to sculpting in Zbrush 1.55b, for the very first time. Yes, it was with a mouse but, it's hard to explain how much it revolutionised things. Now it's just taken for granted, really. But, that's always the case with tech in hindsight, I suppose.

    The tools and resources nowadays(not to mention the cheap and powerful hardware) make it so much easier to both learn and create the art. Which is a fantastic thing as people can concentrate on more artistic areas of study and not worry so much about the technical hacks that have been the norm in years past.
  • Larry
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    Larry interpolator
    Larry said:

    thank you for the time you take to write these replies. I don't take it personally , i am not here to argue with anyone and i kinda felt bad that one thing i said came out perhaps in a negative way. I understand you guys didn't have youtube or many sites giving info on the subject but i dont think you had so many techniques to learn(am i wrong in this?) since the computer technology was not so advanced to support overcomplicated stuff. That said, i started on 2017 learning the art of 3d and when i thought it was only modeling, i came across 100 different things you need to make something new gen, like LOD's lightmaps etc and the level of painting that is needed to make it realistic (yes there are tools that make it easier, but still, more things to learn) All of these get me excited, not overwhelemd or frustrated.But don't say "back in the day we had to learn by ourselves" because the "newbies" are faced with different obstacles both in quality and in quantity and a high level of competition!
    Well, you've missed out on all the fun of straight-ahead animating a walk cycle by directly manipulating manually selected groups of vertices, frame by frame.... :)

    Ye 'olde workflow consisted of:

    Modeling 
    Unwrapping
    Baking
    Texturing
    Rigging/skinning (when it was supported - see above)
    Animating
    And finally.....the hellish nightmare that was getting your assets in-engine....I shudder now to even think of this step.

    Sound familiar?

    Sub-d modeling has been around for decades. The only thing that's changed is that now there are endless resources on how to actually do it. Reading academic papers was actually a thing back then. 

    Building a head/body mesh from scratch when trying to create an anatomically correct model with muscle-flow topology was like a science. No sculpting/retopo for us poor bastards then. But we didn't complain as before us people had to build these models by stitching patch surfaces together! You should
    d look that one up.

    Unwrapping gets terrible press from beginners nowadays. You should have tried it when the tools were archaic, the algorithms in their infancy, and everything had to be planar mapped manually.

    Baking.....haha! This is still the number one issue in 2017. Back then it was the same deal.....minus the logical information widely available today. I was f##king terrified by Normal map baking for a very long and dark period....it was surely dark sorcery.

    Texturing was a LOT of trial and error. And a LOT less pixels.

    Rigging/Skinning was actually quote pleasant as the verts were sparse. :)

    Animating was the same deal as today. Again, minus the resources. 

    Exporting to engine....... I'm already starting to sweat just thinking about this one. As I said above: a hellish nightmare. Today it's basically click, click....in-engine.

    So, in conclusion I would say that people learning today have much more freedom to concentrate on the art side of things. Whilst there is certainly more tools/software to learn, a lot of those early technical barriers have been removed/solved. I still smile when I think of my own awestruck reaction to sculpting in Zbrush 1.55b, for the very first time. Yes, it was with a mouse but, it's hard to explain how much it revolutionised things. Now it's just taken for granted, really. But, that's always the case with tech in hindsight, I suppose.

    The tools and resources nowadays(not to mention the cheap and powerful hardware) make it so much easier to both learn and create the art. Which is a fantastic thing as people can concentrate on more artistic areas of study and not worry so much about the technical hacks that have been the norm in years past.
    I notice you are smiling, however :) Anyway, cheers and thanks again!
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