Xuan Prada

There is always a bit tricky to set up Zbrush displacements in the different render engines.
If you recently moved from Mental Ray or another engine to V-Ray for Maya, maybe you should know a few things about displacement maps extracted from Zbrush.

I wrote down here a simple example of my workflow dealing with that kind of maps and V-Ray.

- First of all drag and drop your 16 bits displacement to the displacement channel inside the shading group attributes.
- Maya will create a displacement node for you in the hypershade. Don’t worry to much about this node, you don’t need to change anything there.

- Select your geometry and add a V-Ray extra attribute to control the subdivisions and displacement properties.
- If you exported your displacement subdividing the UV’s, you should check that property in the V-Ray attributes.
- Edge lenght and Max subdivs are the most important parameter. Play with them until reach nice results.
- Displacement amount is the strength of your displacement and displacement shift sould be half negative than your displacement amount if you are using 16 bits textures.

 

- If you are using 32 bits .exr textures, the displacement shift should be 0 (zero).

 

- Select your 32 bits .exr file and add a V-Ray attribute called allow negative colors.

 

- Render and check that your displacement is looking good.

 

- I’ve been using these displacement maps. 16 bits and 32 bits.