Hey people,
Im doing a lot of digging around into this but can’t seem to find quite what im hopeing for.
Whats the best method of introducing high detail into a model for render. In my example i have a character, i want the skin to have a very detailed texture with quite a bit of relief, like a lizard for example. So producing that is fine using the sculpt tools, then i’ll probably bake to a displacement map. Note its not practical to use a normal map because a normal map doesn’t displace the silhouette of the model, its a fake means of doing this, usually for games only.
However, it seems with blender i would literally have to sub-divide the mesh at render time to a very high value to produce a mesh that is equal in density to the sculpted mesh, this is not an ideal solution given the amount of time it would take to render.
Mental ray gets around this by using a different means of rendering the displacement, which doesn’t displace the mesh.
Am i missing something in blender … at the moment, the ability to render a high resolution mesh with displacement, in an efficient way seems impossible in blender … this is a KEY factor for any kind fo serious feature work that involves characters, think dinosaurs etc…
Dave.