I needed to make a small pile of “Nerds-like” candy pieces. I modeled a set of blobby shapes, applied a nice procedural texture in various colors to them and used the particle system to drop them in a pile. I applied the transformations to freeze them in place (I only need a static image).
So far so good. Except: my new pile of pieces lacks all detail. They still have the same procedural texture applied, but all bump and displacement details are missing.
I brought in fresh copies of the pieces into the document for comparison. The mapping is the same, the subdivision is the same; but the original pieces look detailed, while the newly piled ones look featureless.
What am I missing? At this point, in regards to the actual geometry, they are merely differently oriented, identical copies of the originals. Yet even if I remove the texture and replace it with the version that came in with the fresh pieces I brought in, they simply will not render the same.
I am a 25 plus year veteran of 3D, but have been using Blender for less than a year. I expect there is something obvious that I am overlooking.
If material is not the same, bump and displacement setting may differ.
In Cycles, settings about displacement with adaptative subdivision are scattered between displacement shader node, Setting panel of material tab, Subdivision panel of Render tab, Subdivision Surface modifier.
That is easy to miss one.
Bump depends on lighting. Its disappearance may be related to placement objects regarding lights in scene. Or it may be due to denoising settings.
When I was setting up the particle system, the pieces were coming in huge. I realized I hadn’t applied the scale to the donor objects.
When I applied the scale, this threw off the scale of noise texture in my shader, making the pattern too huge to be noticed.
I multiplied the scale in the Noise node and voila! Problem fixed! The texture is back!
The same “tinker under the hood” philosophy that makes Blender so amazingly powerful, also exposes the novice to a myriad of unnoticed variables that can trip one up. On balance, the trade is worth it. Blender is amazing.