I just finished this piece of artwork, Recently I’ve been playing around with displacements and height maps using textures. For this render, I sort of cheated out of baking a height map conventionally and just rendered out a high quality image of my black and white textures before colouring them (see the image below) However this gave me limited angles for blender to use during displacement (I believe, this is just a guess) so I ended up with jagged colour ramps. I wonder if there was a way I could use the textures directly into the displacement node. I am quite new to this, quick feedback would be much appreciated.
You can plug the procedural texture right into the displacement if you use a Mix Node ( Mix RGB) rather than a mix shader.
Mix Color / Mix RGB mixes Colors, and mix shaders mixes … : shader … Therefore you can use it in any node that uses colors / values as input.
When plugin a color into mix shader, or shader output it works, but it’s more a convenience, especially since a lot of people tend to mis-use shader ( closures) and colors.
Basically when you prepare some maps ( colors, displacement, roughness) you should use nodes that deals with colors , values, of vector. And at the end , this goes into a shader node ( closure) that dictates how the surface should react to light. In your material it doesn’t react to light since it uses a Emission closure under the hood, but it’s still how the surface deals with light and is rendered.
Hope that helps !
That said, even if it’s ok, you might not post your question in the focused critique category but more ask in support / rendering or something like that . Focused critique is more about getting
artistic feedback on your work. It’s not a big deal, maybe next time !
Thanks for your feedback! I tried applying that however while the textures and displacements work the tops are jagged and hard. Any way i could fix this and make it a nice bevel? also I will make sure to post in the right category next time.
Do you use adaptive subdivision ?
TBH, I don’t know exactly what is happening here,
It can be that the texture pattern is too small, by saving an image you force a lower definition of the texture, in some ways it smooth it out, if you see what I mean …
Using the adaptive subdivision, (I wasn’t before because just using a regular subdivision was enough) there is the same problem, less so but its there. It’s possible that theres just too much detail for the modifiers to figure out.
