Making Displacement maps

[ashleyclarke]

I do a lot of climbing wall visualisations but I'm really struggling to improve the look my natural rock walls. Normally I make a basic mesh in Max then export to Mudbox do some sculpting (which I'm not great at) then export back to max to go into my scene, sometimes as a proxy depending how heavy it is.

 

However recently, in the quest for further realism and the holy grail of a universal map I can use on any base mesh I've been trying to use displacement maps and I just can't get the look I'm after. I've tried converting photographs with crazy bump or photoshop and I've tried making my own in photoshop.

 

Ideally I'd want an effect as close to this as possible.

 

 

Any advise on how to go about it would be of great help

[matthewspencer]

Really you should post your previous attempts. Otherwise it's hard to know where you're at.

 

In general, a rock formation like this should have a layered approach: simple geometry which handles the overall form and clumps, sculpting to get the slashes and facets (which you can then bake into a map if you want, or export as geometry). The I would do a displacement map plus a normal map. Displacement should capture medium-sized details and then the normal map should both enhance those details and add the finer details.

 

Try SSBump, it's not hugely different from Crazy Bump but for some reason I like it better. Also it's free.

[RyderSK]

Don't use custom created displacement maps for any sort of detail that is bigger than few milimeters. It will look completely wrong, everytime.

 

Since this is pretty artificial surface, best way (but not fast or easy one) would be to sculpt tileable texture that resembles it (in Mudbox or Zbrush), than apply to unwrapped mesh in either those two apps or directly in 3dsMax, or any combination in-between. Many ways.

You can sculpt using photo-scanned data from few sources:

 

a) SurfaceMimic

b) Quixel Megascans (requires beta sign-up)

 

Or you can use tileable texture from above to directly displace your mesh, but as I said, I doubt you will find artificial surface like that among references.

In the end, it's the only way to make it trully convincing.

 

If you're able to take good orthogonal photography at the site (with some 80mm+ lens) you might be able to derive the displacement map yourself either by making a photogrametric scan of it, or manually creating it from photo itself in nDO by using various layers to stack normal maps, and export a heighmap from it in the end.

[ashleyclarke]

I shall try and post some stuff tomorrow as I was working on this problem today.

[Corey Beaulieu]

Just a side note about your statement in your post...

 

Proxying a single object won't do anything for you, just may make your viewport lighter. You could just as easily display as box. Proxies are best for higher-poly objects that are copied or instanced around the scene. It means you will only have to load them once. If you only have one to load, then there is nothing gained by your effort.

[Francisco Penaloza]

I also think the mix between modeling and displacement should be the approach to this, a procedural texture will be more memory optimized, but some of this shapes may seems chaotic but there is some planing on them so it is not all random.

For what I understand you can get normal maps from Zbrush or mudbox, so maybe you can look more on that route.

A method that I use also is modeling a high density mesh and create a displacement map using the Zdepth pass, as Bertrand showed on this tutorial.

http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2010/03/31/frank-gehry-style-titanium-scales/

 

Your mesh is not flat bu same concept can be aplied.

 

also a new way can be using Autodesk 3d photo scanning software (free) to create copy a dense mesh then get normals and displacement map from it.

 

http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2012/09/22/bits-of-bread/

 

and since some of those wall are build in panels maybe you can do a visit to your client factory and photograph some sections to use them as textures for your 3D.

 

Now if you want a render that close as the photo shown, I would recommend to model it, displacement work great but in very close up they always look noisy or distorted.