Interesting algorythm of distributing/cloning 3d geometry, alternative to scattering.
yet another renderengine i wish blender had access to!
Though cool, I personally would love that blender first finish the current engine. Cycles let alone Eevee both require a bit of work and optimizations.
Yes, FStorm is nice but you can have Octane or Vray-RT for Blender instead if you want to spend money on a capable GPU render solution.
We would need vector displacement first.
We have vector displacement?
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2018-January/103961.html
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2018-February/104312.html
Yes, in 2.79 from master/buildbot. We even have documentation:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/cycles/nodes/types/vector/vector_displacement.html
…“or tangent, normal and bitangent axes (Tangent Space) respectively.”
And these are? Not written for “normal” people.
Or are these explained somewhere else I’ve missed?
You don’t necessarily need to understand how this works exactly, but any 3D artist should know what “normal” and “tangent” means (bitangent is simply another vector that is perpendicular to both of those, so all three together form a basis).
The point is, if you want to displace by a vector, the question arises: What space is that vector encoded in? You must simply know this about your data. If you baked the texture, your application would’ve asked you which space to use, or told you which space is being used. The same is true for normal maps.
As a rule of thumb: If the map is bluish, it’s most likely a tangent space map, otherwise it’s probably object space. World space is what you would use when you want to displace along a direction that you know from the given scene (you probably won’t want to bake it).