If you did mean: UVSphere, then, yes, the artifacts are there, especially around the poles. In that sense the Icosphere has more even distribution of the triangles.
He probably meant a Quadsphere / Roundcube – subdivision works best on quads, can cause issues on trigons or ngons. Early troubleshooting would include checking if the issue happens on an all-quads object like a quadsphere. Extra Objects (included addon) has one, or:
Take the Default Cube (or add a Cube), Subdivide it a few times and Apply the modifier, Cast Sphere Factor 1.00 on all three axis’ and Apply, scale it to what you need and apply the scale transformation, then try it and let us know if the issue’s still happening.
Not how I would’ve done it, but trying this on a quadsphere is more important than how you get one.
Yep! For example, is your material using the object’s UV map? Then good UV mapping might be important – the Extra Object’s Roundcube doesn’t have a default UV map, Blender’s base primitives (including the Cube) do. Or feel free to use mine:
Made a quad sphere like you did with geo-nodes, then, applied same Displacements as for other icospheres in my scene, and the “cracks” were already apparent in wireframe mode, besides it all rendered out with jagged lines, even for 8th lvl subdivision.
Reduced the geo-node Subdivs to 3 and applied SubdivisionSurface modifier, followed by same Displaces, had to increase the SubSurf level to 8 to achieve the previous result I had with icospheres.
My answer to your original question is negative, i.e. changing to quad sphere showed no improvements. Besides, my guess is, converting icosphere to SubSurf, which has even triangle distribution, generates uniform quad mesh, which in turn in any case gets triangulated for the renderer.
It rather has something to do with the Voronoi texture mixing.
Here’s my scene: Voronoi-mix-spheres_01.blend (1.4 MB)
At frame #166 you can see ico and quad spheres overlapping, where even in the viewport cracks can be seen.
Thank you for the input, however, my bad, I got that default rounded cube and had no idea what to do with it, how to make it even rounder - I am a Blender newbie. Anyways, I ended up generating quad sphere with geo-nodes, like @AlphaChannel suggested.
Since I displace Subdivision surfaces, then the Icosphere topology is sufficient, as it is uniform. What you said about the issues was true for the uvSphere, where we have two poles, otherwise trigons and ngons are ok, as those are being converted to quads (and, at render level, triangulated anyway), so the issues there might arise for uneven topology or non-manifold geometry.
Regarding the UVs, in this case, it is less important, as all textures are either volumetic or procedural. Yet, useful to know for the future projects.
What do you mean, by “lose it”? Loosen or change to anything else?
The larger displacement indeed used Manhattan, the smaller one DistSquared… However, I tried several other combos of DistanceMetric models and the cracks are still there.
Is it possible to blur the texture, before it is plugged into Displace modifier?
Yeah try another texture, blurring is not really possible unless you use a vector blur or pre blur yr texture after baking using a paint program or through the compositor.
I added another geo-nodes mod with the setup you’ve just shown. Strangely enough, this works only at the display level, the render is unaffected.
Tried also using other textures for the first Displacement, however, perhaps of my lack of exp with Blender, all those were missing that puffy cloudiness the Voronoi has.
Looking at your file, I’m pretty sure this is happening because you are using 2 displacement modifiers. The second one inflates the first one further, causing the lines that are present in the first displacement to overlap.
The obvious solution would be to replace the first displacement’s texture with an other that doesn’t have sharp lines anywhere.
But If you want to keep the current texture as close as possible, I have a slightly different modifier stack to propose.
The 2 displacements are the same as they were. The difference is that I do the first displacement with fewer subdivisions, which allows me to then add a smooth modifier to get rid of the sharp cracks.
After the first displacement is done and smoothed, only then I add the rest of the subdivisions and do the second displacement. Because there are no sharp cracks in the first, the second cannot inflate them into overlaps.
The pattern for the second displacement will compress a bit in some areas, but it’s no longer sharp lines.
The only thing I changed in your setup was division swap in Subdivs, which made less geo, but enough for the second Displace. Worked also on the Icospheres.
Do you know, is there a way to copy-paste modifiers from one object to another, multiple at a time?
Not how I would’ve done it, but trying this on a quadsphere is more important than how you get one.
