>Did you apply the displacement to a fillet?<

Yes, and applied a red style in Moi where I wanted to use the weld material/displacement in Modo.

Hi Oskar,

> I guess I have to choose between super smooth and
> extra details from time to time.

Yeah, sometimes you will need to make this choice.

But if you can keep the geometry in place (with vertex normals), and only paint a displacement texture map on it to add detail, that's the case that gives you the best of both worlds.

Can you maybe describe a bit more about why you were unable to do that with your original case? Does Modo have a problem dealing with UV seams making it hard to make a good looking displacement in an area where there are seams?

Maybe in the future Modo could use the Ptex system to make that work better - it's a system that can be used instead of UV mapping, it instead makes a kind of separate mini texture for every little individual polygon but then also has a filtering mechanism that is supposed to make things work better across borders.

I think Ptex was particularly designed to make painting on stuff easier without having to set up UV mapping.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I agree that a displacement map is the best compromise. Modo is pretty good with UVs so that is not the issue. Although I'm no expert on displacement maps, I think they are very sensitive to UV-seams. In this particular case with two cylinders I think it is very hard to get a good UV without seams. To make things even worse there is no fillet between my cylinders. If I manage to add fillets I think it is going to be ok.

If Ptex gets widely adopted it is gonna make life alot easier for alot of people, me included.

Thanks for your help!

/Oskar

Hi Oskar,

> Although I'm no expert on displacement maps, I think they
> are very sensitive to UV-seams.

I'm not sure if that absolutely has to be the case though...

The Ptex stuff for example basically has the equivalent of seams at every polygon edge, but apparently it also incorporates some mechanisms to make the transitions work better.

So I'd think it would be possible to have something similar applied to regular UV map displacement painting.

You may want to try ZBrush or 3D-Coat to see if they handle doing displacement map painting across regular UV seams better than what you are seeing in Modo.

- Michael

Hi Oskar, I did a bit of digging, and there appears to be plenty of complaints about displacement map painting in Modo not really working as well as it should across seams, here is a discussion thread:

http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=37566


So based on that discussion, I would say you should definitely try 3D-Coat at least and see if you can paint a displacement map better in there, and then just assign that map in Modo instead of doing the actual painting in Modo for displacements.

If that eliminates the issue you ran into with seam displacement artifacts, then you would have a workable general solution set up.


All kinds of models can have UV seams in them, so I don't think just trying to avoid seams is really feasible.

- Michael

3D Coat has Ptex now.
Brian