Geometry from Blender Cycles?

Hi,

I saw a cool tutorial that uses cycles to put displacement on simple spheres to make them into rocks:

However, I’d like to apply the displacement created in cycles on the object’s geometry, so that I can export it as a HighPoly to then make game assets.

My question is: how can you apply/bake the geometry created during the cycle render, or can cycle only affect objects during a render?

I’d rather not use a displacement map, just move the vertexes and create a highpoly model.

Thank you

Hmmm🤔 Not sure if it would work, but have you tried to just subdivide the mesh to the extreme and use a displace modifier? Then apply the modifier and voila, a rock! Aren’t most noise textures in cycles avaliable as textures in the texture panel too?

Hi, thanks for the answer.

Do you think, in the cycle nodes, that we can save the output of the displacement? So I could use the result from cycles to bake a displacement?

Ah, and the displacement looks good because the noises are applied on Generated UVs not ordinary UVs.

Is it possible to keep these UVs seomwhere, because the ordinary UVs have seams which cause bugs for the displacement.

Yes exactly. Procedural textures and generated UVs seems to be much better for this kind of things.
I’m not sure if it’s actually practically possible, but wouldn’t it at least be theoretically possible to make something like this:

  1. Make the rock as he describes in the video.
  2. Bake this as a displacement texture.
  3. Use this displacement texture with the displacement modifier for another rock.
    Convoluted? Yes definitely. But it might work.

Baking and UV mapping isn’t really my strong skills so can’t really help you with a good workflow there.

I made a quick test with a roundcube and some modifiers:


This is far from as powerful as you can do it with nodes so I wouldn’t say it’s a replacement for his technique. It’s also more taxing for the CPU since everything is actual geometry, but if you really need geometry that’s one way of solving it some what. :sweat_smile:

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Thank you, I started with displacement modifiers, like voronois for more stylized rocks.

What texture(s)/noise(s) did you use to get this concrete looking rock?

So unlike cycles, using displacement is a bit weak, as you said, so I’ll need to zbrush it to reach actual professional quality.

I’m getting pretty nice results with a varieties of noises, thank you for your help!

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The original mesh was a roundcube with 40 divisions. The modifiers was the three you see on the right hand side on the screen shot, iirc the first displacement modifier used a voronoi texture and the last used a clouds texture. Sorry but I can’t remember the texture settings. Didn’t save the file… :smile:

Nice to be able to help! :smile:
Looking good! Seems like some weathered sand stone or similar to me, nice! :+1: