Never thought of putting an extra reflector outside the image…good idea!
Wish I had more RAM though so that I could actually DO something! Well, for now I can boggle at the eyecandy that is cycles high poly rendering.
when I use displacement bumps I get really ugly lines on my mesh from the UV. How can I stop that from happening?
Displacements coming from?
Never thought of putting an extra reflector outside the image…good idea!
Well, it was actually a bad idea. Compare the two renders. One in 2 mins without reflector, the other 30 mins with reflector.
The maps are exported from Zbrush.
That’ll be because of mip mapping/filtering blending pixels outside the seam with those within…
that’s why when you bake in blender there’s a “Bleed” amount. Been ages since I used zbrush… but I’m sure you can set a bleed ssomewhere…
There is bleed amount in zbrush, I’m wondering… did you check “smooth UVs” when baking displacement maps? zb 4.
You should not its a trap LOL. Never had ZB disp_maps visible seams in blender. Normal maps are more complicated.
another old model… really seeing the flaws in my sculpt!
bump went flaky here too.
Nice tests mike, bumps… good for pores and sharpening details only. And they have to be 16-32 bit. Latest BI builds support this. Cycles?
I did a lot of tests using a box-room. Playing with dimensions I’m facing some terrible flaws of cycles. Its unpredictable. Casted shadows don’t look right sometimes, not at all.
Waiting for a better build, I’m not so optimist. Now I realize that it make take years. Meanwhile, you’re right, cycles (GI) shows all sculpting flaws, so, I started working on very simple forms. Another sculptris fast one. WIP.
On displacement maps from Zbrush – make sure you’ve flipped them vertically. If you haven’t, and you don’t feel like regenerating your image, you can set the Y value in the image mapping to -1.0.
Also. how do you get bumps to work with cycles? as far as I can tell, you can tell it to use an image texture for displacement, but you can’t tell it what image to use 
Michalis, I like the scene. In my tests, cast shadows seem accurate enough … in what cases did you notice a problem? I Have noticed that if you’re in edit mode, changing size and shape of a model doesn’t register with cycles until after you’ve gone back into object mode. That may have caused some confusion if you’re expecting transformations in edit mode to change shadows in the preview render. (Note, I put a couple cycles tests in the longer thread, didn’t want to add them to both)
oofnish, if you have an image node correctly hooked up in your node tree you can open an image from the material properties list… the image node should show up there.
Michalis, I disagree about bumps… That last picture I posted was about as bad as it gets…
they work fine with the right source… Cycles seems to support high colour depth bumps too, but 8bit can be plenty depending on what you’re “bumping”.
compare:
with the bare mesh:
another angle:
The result is indistinguishable from a normal map, can be used for displacement should you choose, (or a hybrid bump/displace system like is planned for cycles)… is easier to manually edit and can be painted direct from within blender.
Normal maps are a necessity for games, but IMO are a clunky waste of time in blender.
I think normal mapping was indeed created specifically for scanline based on old bump mapping from raytracers. Both used to the same end: cause perturbations to the normals of a surface. That also explains why you usually don’t see normal mapping in raytracers. Now that Cycles is pure a raytracer rather than a hybrid like BI, I don’t see much point in supporting a scanline technique.
Normal maps are a necessity for games, but IMO are a clunky waste of time in blender.
I really hope you’re right. I’m not a masochist.
But I repeat myself. Construct an enclosure, a cube, normals inwards just in case LOL, then start changing dimensions. I know this issue with edit mode and some similar ones. See what’s happening, how render time changes, dramatically, etc etc.
The way I have been doing it is, go into nodes view. Add both a Texture Coordinate and Image Texture node. Connect Texture coordinate UV to Image texture in, Connect Image texture out to Material Displacement. Now in the properties view under the materials tab you will notice a new box that says open is under displacement.
I have the bumps working better now but if I switch displacement to “true” or “both” it looks over inflated, is there any way to make the effect weaker. I have played with some settings in ZBrush and have not figured it out yet.
Thanks for your help. I hope to have time this weekend to make something to post
changing dimensions in edit mode or object mode? (so I can test the same conditions you’re testing)
Changes in edit mode work as expected so far (as long as tab to object mode to update the render window… shadows look fine to me and render times are consistent… (only a feeling there… not done timed renders to know for sure…
will continue tests in object mode…
Yep, you can scale a displacement texture easily… just connect the output of the texture to a “math” node (or to be super safe connect
IMAGE—>RGBtoBW—>Math(value1)
(RGBtoBW and Math are in the converter section)
set the math node to multiply… use Value2 the same as you would the influence slider in blender internal
Mike: Just try to move the room in object mode. Or in edit mode, just play with emitters values so to update, If I got it right.
wow love the sculptures impressive works have you got any of them animated ?
Ah! I didn’t think to look back on the materials panel for the texture selection, since the image node wasn’t selectable there. It still didn’t work very well at all, but it turned out the build I was using had broken UV mapping. Grabbed a new build (36698) and it worked much better
Impressive work so far 
I’m gonna jump in soon.
Thanks oofnish, agentmilo, yes, please jump in.
Some more work on these statuettes,
