Ok, first things first! There is such a thing as a TC_VectorDisplacementmap compression setting! Holy crap! Totally missed this one. It must have been implemented in the last year or so. The reason why it is not being distorted properly is because you need to uncheck sRGB and set the UnpackMin values to -1. That would be…
Welcome to the technical part of tech art. :) Quick review: an 8 bit value has a maximum integer value of 255. A 16 bit integer has a maximum of 65536. each additional bit increases the range of values by one power of 2. Since our normal textures have 8 bits per channel, using one channel for the lower 8 bits and a second…
As promised, here are some of my initial tests utilizing flow maps for VFX. While the basic premise is the same, using this on particles has its own advantages. Mainly since particles typically have fixed lifetimes, I don't have to worry about blending various states. Flow increases over time, then the particle dies. We…