Richard Gavin

Making me some stylized trees.
The labs tools are doing all the heavy lifting and it turns out there is a new birch grunge texture already built into Copernicus which did a very nice job on the bark. Animation needs work but out of time.

got dragged onto something else for a bit but just wanted to update this problem.

Looked over this problem with a mate and I think generating clean displacement maps in Houdini will not work. I think what is happening is that when baking your map the low poly geo is not being subdivided (I think of this as smoothed rather than amount of geo). When your map is reapplied at render time your renderer dices up your geo and smoothes your mesh. because your points are now in a different position you get banding. Ive attached a hip that shows what I mean replicating the issue in sop.

I dont think that Mantra currently supports unwrapping and subdivision so this is a bit of a roadblock. You can mitigate the problem by subdividing your low poly object a bit more but this kind of defeats the purpose of using a displacement map.

If I have this correct it seems a bit of a pity that Mantra doesnt support unwrapping for displacement as it would be a very nice modelling workflow, something like Transfer Maps in Maya only with all Houdinis flexibility. Assuming there was interest (its not all about fx guys I think it wouldnt be the most difficult thing for sidefx to implement either.

Im going to be back looking at this again soon currently I am going through mudbox to generate the maps which work fine but is fairly manual. Have had some success with mayas Tranfer maps but its a bit flaky at generating them in uv space. Might also take a look at zbrush as I could zscript it I think.

Again if I find anything interesting that will help in automating displacement map generation I will post it back here.

sorry forgot to upload hip. the only thing added to brian file is an attempt to render a displace from a quick sculpt on a sphere which gives banding. I added a cop network to try and blur the edges of the disp map. Apologies for my awful attempt at comp but it does kind of work.

Was thinking I might take a look at Ptex in houdini and see where that takes me. From what I have quickly read you can generate a ptex file with gptex a houdini added extra. Not sure if it is possible to generate a ptex file using brians displacement shader shooting in the dark a bit but you never know. If I find anything interesting I will post it back here. It would be nice to have this in Hou.