Displacement map only works in "Bump Only"

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1

Hello

I’m trying to figure out why does my displacement map seem to work only when the displacement is set to “bump only” and not “displacement and bump” or even “displacement”?

Feature set is set to experimental and there is adaptive subdiv on model. Map is an exr 32bit from Zbrush.

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2

did you try non color data in your color space 's texture setup?

3 Likes
3

Is this rendered in Cycles? I don’t use it myself, but I don’t think Eevee (and thus material preview mode) supports microdisplacement (yet). If you try, you might want to reduce the scale by a heck of a lot. Try 0.001-0.01 range first to avoid model to completely blow up. 0.001 means 1mm difference from black to white.

4

I guess it has something to do with file format of the Image Texture you’re using, which is EXR. I never used EXR for image texture myself, but it works perfectly every time with PNG.

5

I’m able to use the “night_city.exr” for microdisplacement.

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Top left: Cycles render preview where I reduced the viewport dicing scale for illustration.
Top right: Material preview. Renders as a bump effect, Eevee limitation.
Bottom left: Node setup. The image is one of the builtin environments I think, which does use a compressed exr but I don’t think it should matter. Running through a power to even out the values since the image isn’t suitable at all for this.
Bottom right: Final denoised render at 10 samples.

So if the image doesn’t work, what Blender version are you on? If the image does work but yours doesn’t, are you able to make it work by converting to something else? Or share a failed simplified setup using only a rectangle and a small (cropped) portion of the 32bit file.

6

Hmm I tried all of the above, I tried exporting a TIF file using non-color space and it still only shows in “bump only”, not “displacement and bump” nor “displacement only”.
It’s very odd!!

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If I use “displacement and bump” and up the scale to 10, the model is messed but I see some details

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7

Your displacement map is called ..normal.. … are you using a normalmap as displacement ?? Then maybe this greyscaled version leads to visible bumpy effect but fails to displace this correctly… ?? IDK…

IDK what you meant by:

regarding tips using cycles… because… if this is not a rendered viewport using cycles then a fake bump will show a result… but then there would be no cycles displacement…

8

So at least the image is displacing, good to know. Now, what does the image look like in the image editor? I didn’t even catch the name “normal” in there, which makes me suspect this is a normal map (centered around RGB 0.5, 0.5, 1.0) and not a displacement/bump map (grayscale).
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/vector/normal_map.html
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/vector/displacement.html

9

oh no the title was just named badly, it’s one of those “old_test_normalCC_Base_SkinHead(11)1-DM_u0_v0_copy003” kind of names haha.
i tested out all the options given above but still can’t get the displacement to work.

and yes i’m using cycles!

10

Turns out it was a scale issue! Somewhere between the softwares I was using with GoZ, the scale got messed up with!