ZBrushCentral

Animating a cross-fade between two displacement maps?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I would like to be able to have a mesh in Maya, and animate a cross-fade between two different displacement maps created in Zbrush. I thought of creating a layered shader in Maya for the displacement map, and animating the opacities of various displacements within. I’ve heard that this will not work, but that there is a workaround using another method. I searched these forums but haven’t found anything yet. If anyone can point me in the right direction I’d appreciate it. Thanks! :wink:

#2

Nevermind, I found a tutorial elsewhere on this site. :slight_smile:

#3

Here a simple network sample:

Chris

#4

Thanks, Chris… OK, I implemented this network but am still having trouble getting a render out.

I tried it with both RenderMan and mental ray. With RenderMan, it seemed like it was taking an abnormally long time to compile the shader. I guess because it has to compile two 4K displacement .tif’s. I killed it after about a half-hour. Is that kind of time length to be expected? (PC, 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM…) Also, as with the Plus/Minus/Average node, the status line said that RenderMan didn’t recognize the blender node either. Perhaps this is what was hanging the render?

With mental ray, I used the same network but with two 4k .map’s, and the status line said “render completed”, but the actual rendered file was only 1K and empty. Not sure what’s up with that??

Thanks for any help…

#5

Hmmm…
I’m not using Renderman for Maya - only MR…
All I can suggest is that you DL the ‘JS_PlusMinusAverage’ MR node from
Jan’s site:
http://www.pixero.com/downloads_mr.html
and try that instead :slight_smile:

As you’ll see, all I’m using is a simple ‘Color Blender’ node, and plugging the
alphas from the 32 bit maps into the ‘R’ channels of the ‘Color Blender’ and
the same channel from the ‘Color Blender’ into the ‘Displacement’ node…

Good luck :slight_smile:

Chris