I'm working in Houdini Apprentice 21.0.512 - Py3.11, and I have been following a tutorial on YouTube from Magic Market on procedural rock generation. I got to the part about baking out the displacement map, in the third video, but I can't get it to apply it back on correctly. Here's the relevant part of the series I'm stumped on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTPR0cUVRdg [www.youtube.com]

I set up the baketexture node as he does, with a base sphere that has UVs applied, and a higher resolution version subdivided sphere copy, with noise applied, to serve as the displaced geometry. You can see both of those two spheres here:



I then use an objmerge node in a new "render" node that has the low resolution sphere with UVs applied in it, and that geometry node has a principle shader with the displacement map loaded as a texture. However, when I visualize that node in the scene, it just looks jumbled and broken:



And when I do an in-scene render, it doesn't look as broken, but it certainly doesn't look right at all:



I'm including my test file here. You'll need to save it, and then you can go into the /out/baketexture1 node and render the displacement map to disk, which should then be able to be picked up in texture path parameter of the /mat/principledshader1 node. Please let me know if anyone might have a clue of why this looks incorrect. I'm unable to get to the step of comparing the original object against the rendered object with the displacement map applied.