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Author Topic: Achieving displacement on RailClone brick wall / display strangeness...  (Read 1807 times)

Barry

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Hi,

I was going to post this in this this thread, but seeing as it's quite old the forum advised to make a new thread instead so here we are...

I'm using a small amount of displacement on the segments in this brick wall (based on the style kindly supplied by Paul Roberts here.)

I've not applied any displacement modifiers to anything; just using maps and the Vray displacement globals. But when I render I get no displacement. See below. (The mortar/grout object is separate, it also has displacement which is why it's breaking through the bricks).



But I noticed when I simply add an EditPoly modifier above the RC object, and do nothing else - I get displacement:



My question is - is this the correct way of working with displacement on RailClone objects now? Is there a better way?

I ask because after applying the EditPoly mod, the RC objects behave erratically in the scene - the segments will randomly jump around all over the scene, even when I'm not working with them. I fixed this by unchecking 'Auto' build on the RC objects, but now - the objects insist on defaulting to a 'Mesh' display in the viewport - even when I have them set to 'Box'. Clicking 'Build' will force them to go back to displaying as boxes, but after a minute or two - they will revert back to meshes. See here:


Any ideas? I keep having to fix the RC objects and it's causing quite a lot of slowdown in my workflow.

Paul Roberts

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Re: Achieving displacement on RailClone brick wall / display strangeness...
« Reply #1 on: August 15, 2016, 05:51:38 PM »
Hi,

Thanks for the questions. Unfortunately objects distributed with RailClone cannot be displaced while retaining instancing. This is a limitation of using V-Ray's proxy technology, which RailClone does invisibly behind the scenes.

As mentioned in the previous post it is possible to displace the whole RailClone object, but this is not very memory efficient. As an alternative you could create higher resolution brick models and apply the displacement effect to the mesh using a standard Max Displace modifier (so that it is displaced before rendering, in the viewports). This will of course create a very dense mesh but if the RC object is not bending or slicing any bricks it could be more efficient and faster rendering in the long run than displacing the whole wall.

If you do choose to displace the wall you can turn off Instancing Engine in the Display rollout. This will cause displacement to work correctly without having to apply an Edit Poly modifier and it should hopefully resolve the other issues you're encountering.

I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks!

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

Barry

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Re: Achieving displacement on RailClone brick wall / display strangeness...
« Reply #2 on: August 17, 2016, 01:13:03 PM »
Thanks Paul, I suspected I was going at it wrong. Was only using displacement as I made a 190 piece multi-texture set for those bricks and included a depth pass so was just curious to see if it could be used. I'll stick with bumps. Cheers! B.

Paul Roberts

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Re: Achieving displacement on RailClone brick wall / display strangeness...
« Reply #3 on: August 17, 2016, 05:03:21 PM »
No problem, glad I could help out. The bricks look great by the way!

Cheers,

Paul
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

Barry

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Re: Achieving displacement on RailClone brick wall / display strangeness...
« Reply #4 on: August 17, 2016, 07:14:32 PM »
The bricks look great by the way!

Thanks dude! - It's mainly down to a newly acquired secret weapon.