What is the best way to switch displacement off and just use bumping in H9?
Say I've prepared a displacement shader, and I've put that together with a surface shader in a material. Can I then make the displacement behave as bump or do I have to copy the vex nodes into the surface shader and connect to N before the lighting? Wouldn't it be nice if you could decide only later to use bumping rather then displacing? Is there a property that needs to be set maybe? A toggle like “Don't really to displace, fake it with bump”?

Tell me what your approach is.

thanks,

Dries.

You can do this by adding the “true displacements” and “ray true displacements” properties to an object or material and disabling them. I've attached an example that adds these properties to a material with the VEX fractal dent shader.

Andrew

Excellent! And what a fast reply!
Man, I'm really loving H9, for almost every wish I can come up with, there is already an answer. Fantastic!

Since you sent me this hip file Andrew, I've got another question:
Why is it that when turning true displacement for raytracing on, I can still see some ‘squares’ on the sphere. Like little patches. I can lessen that by turning up pixel samples, but even with 10x10 they don't completely disappear. I don't see them when using micropolygon (true displacement). I've added a displacement bound property as well, but even on 20 the patches don't go away.