putting hd morphs directly onto the normals?

Upirium

is it possible [to put hd morphs directly onto the normals] at all? i am using the aging morphs for a char but they don't show up quite as well because of the skin texture it seems like

is there any way i can make normals from just the face where the wrinkles are so that they show up better?

Snow

deleted

Richard Haseltine

Genesis 9 has higher resolution, and so more detail, than Genesis 8.

Yes, you would need to use an external application to do the baking from mesh to normal maps

HD and displacement both have the same otential for detail in that they both maniupulate the virtual vertices created by SubD - but of course the HD doesn't require passing a map to the render, just modified geometry data. On the other hand, given resolution in the map displacemetn can continue to add detail while an HD morph as a division level at which it was created and beyond which it is just smoothing by interpolation.

PixelSploiting

Export separately base and HD meshes to an external app, then bake from HD to base mesh.

Drawback of normalmaps is that their "fake" geometry becomes apparent in sharp rim lightning. On the other hand, fine facial wrinkels probably won't be deep enough to show this.

Matt_Castle

Richard Haseltine said:

but of course the HD doesn't require passing a map to the render, just modified geometry data.

Unless it's been changed in more recent versions of Iray, Displacement doesn't pass maps to the renderer either. The maps are used during initialisation in order to generate the geometry that will be given to the GPU, but the maps themselves aren't ever passed to VRAM (unless, of course, they're being reused for something else).

I ran various tests on VRAM usage a while back, and what mattered with regards to the VRAM usage of Displacement was only the actual level of subdivision (noting that the entire figure will get divided to whatever the maximum of any of its surfaces is), with the maps themselves having no impact.

(Of course, if using another rendererer like 3DL, that rule may not hold).

PixelSploiting

Yeah, displacement maps can substantially increase memory usage, but they do not count against texture load. They are instructions for the GPU how to calculate extra "fake" geometry. It's this extra geometry what increases the memory usage. This is true on all renderers (Blender internal ones included). Normal and bump maps only alter angle of the lightning falling on the object and do count into textures loaded.

Richard Haseltine

Matt_Castle said:

Richard Haseltine said:

but of course the HD doesn't require passing a map to the render, just modified geometry data.

Unless it's been changed in more recent versions of Iray, Displacement doesn't pass maps to the renderer either. The maps are used during initialisation in order to generate the geometry that will be given to the GPU, but the maps themselves aren't ever passed to VRAM (unless, of course, they're being reused for something else).

I ran various tests on VRAM usage a while back, and what mattered with regards to the VRAM usage of Displacement was only the actual level of subdivision (noting that the entire figure will get divided to whatever the maximum of any of its surfaces is), with the maps themselves having no impact.

(Of course, if using another rendererer like 3DL, that rule may not hold).

I wasn't aware of that - in that case there is no Iray-side difference between dispalcement and HD morphs.