3D Creative December 2015

3DCREATIVE MAGAZINE | Mastering displacement details
Setup of VRayDisplacement in 3ds Max
Before anything, the final result in 3ds Max will
depend directly on how your mesh behaves.
If you have many stars in your topology and
some odd distribution of polygons, this may
screw up the displacement. That’s why I always
export two types of maps in TIFF format: 32-bit
displacements with mid 0, and 16-bit with mid 0.5
setup. The first is obviously much more accurate
and I use it with VRayDisplacement modifier, but
the second is for using a non-scale-dependent
workflow with the displace modifier in 3ds Max. I
also use the 16-bit version to help add details to
the texture. In the image you can see my setup for
exporting the maps and mesh.
Using VRayDisplacement in 3ds
04 Max: Now that our displacement maps
are properly exported and our new meshes
are imported in 3ds Max, it’s time to reproduce
the sculpted details directly in the render. First
you should check if all the vertices are split
using the Unwrap UVW modifier – this method
helps to avoid wrong distribution of details
after subdividing the mesh. After this, add the
VRayDisplacement modifier and follow the
settings shown in the image. It’s important to
apply the displacement map using a VRayHDRI
shader, since it’s made especially for handling
32-bit images, and make sure you set the Color
Skin Polypainting in ZBrush
Space option to ‘None’. Another important setting
is to set the Texmap min and max to -1 and 1, in
order to tell the displacement to add negative
and positive deformation to the mesh.
Painting the skin colors: I usually
05 paint most of the textures directly
in Photoshop, but for the skin I use a mixed
workflow of Polypaint in ZBrush with some
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