Handling displacement...

Salem2007

Thanks for the info 3DAGE, it almost makes sense :-)!

I was taking the defaults with the NVIDIA plugin--I suspected it wasn't giving me enough definition to be noticable. I'll try the filterforge trial--I'd love to be able to get that little bit of depth I see in some Poser renders that I don't get in Carrara (especially in armor and stone type items). I've been thinking about buying zbrush-I need to research the Go-Z plug in some more (but that's another thread!)

Dartanbeck

Salem2007 said:

I'd love to be able to get that little bit of depth I see in some Poser renders that I don't get in Carrara (especially in armor and stone type items). I've been thinking about buying zbrush-I need to research the Go-Z plug in some more (but that's another thread!)

One crazy thing about Carrara is that wonderful texture room.
If your armor comes with good bump maps, try cranking them up a little. But the big thing that often gets ignored in Carrara is the correlation between highlight and shininess - which I'm thinking stems from V4 starting out blue in Carrara - so everyone turns the highlight channel off or to black.

Instead, look through the textures folder in the runtime that contains your armor. If it comes with a map ending in "S", that's a Specular map. Plop that baby in the highlight channel and, for something like metal plate armor, try running a shininess of anywhere between 0 and 4. You'll see that depth come out!
If your product doesn't come with a specular map, I'll often fake it either using a 1-100 percentage value multiplied against the bump map, or a fairly bright color, or greyscale. If you don't like using multiply, just drag your color towards black without ever reaching pure black, and you should be good. With a map, change the brightness down to 20 or less. Otherwise, I use that percentage around 20 or less as a multiplier. My personal taste, I guess. Makes it easy for me to change, but I guess the other ways are just as easy.

Some things I've actually taken the bump all the way up to 250 to get the results I wanted.

Also, don't forget the importance (in hero images) to add a really bright back light that only affects the character. Lighting helps with depth, too. Most things shouldn't require Normal Maps to get great results with Carrara.

Dartanbeck

Roygee said:

Very interesting discussion:)

Just as a matter of interest, our very own Hexagon can generate a bump map to be used on a low-poly version and you don't need two models.

You take your model up a couple of smoothing levels without collapsing Dynamic Geometry, paint with the displacement tool. Export the bump map, take it back down to unsmoothed, collapse DG and export as .obj.

This quick example was done after converting the bump map to a normal map in Gimp - same sphere, both 1280 polys. Using the bump map as displacement also works, but really rough result. I guess it could be refined by someone who knows how to do these things:)

Peachy and Keen!
Did you know that Carrara has displacement painting? Sure it does! ;)

Salem2007

Dartanbeck said:

Salem2007 said:

I'd love to be able to get that little bit of depth I see in some Poser renders that I don't get in Carrara (especially in armor and stone type items). I've been thinking about buying zbrush-I need to research the Go-Z plug in some more (but that's another thread!)

If your product doesn't come with a specular map, I'll often fake it either using a 1-100 percentage value multiplied against the bump map, or a fairly bright color, or greyscale. If you don't like using multiply, just drag your color towards black without ever reaching pure black, and you should be good. With a map, change the brightness down to 20 or less. Otherwise, I use that percentage around 20 or less as a multiplier.

So you add two bump maps to the bump channel, or a multiple bump channel with a map and a color? I'm not sure I follow.....

thoromyr

Salem2007 said:

Dartanbeck said:

Salem2007 said:

I'd love to be able to get that little bit of depth I see in some Poser renders that I don't get in Carrara (especially in armor and stone type items). I've been thinking about buying zbrush-I need to research the Go-Z plug in some more (but that's another thread!)

If your product doesn't come with a specular map, I'll often fake it either using a 1-100 percentage value multiplied against the bump map, or a fairly bright color, or greyscale. If you don't like using multiply, just drag your color towards black without ever reaching pure black, and you should be good. With a map, change the brightness down to 20 or less. Otherwise, I use that percentage around 20 or less as a multiplier.

So you add two bump maps to the bump channel, or a multiple bump channel with a map and a color? I'm not sure I follow.....

What Dart is talking about is re-using the bump channel's texture map. For a "glowing eye" effect I'll often just copy the diffuse (color) channel's texture map to the glow channel, possibly with some tweaking (e.g., using multiply to darken it a bit).

If there's no bump map you can some times get by using the diffuse channel's texture map in the bump channel. Basically it gets used as a fully desaturated image.

Roygee

Did you know that Carrara has displacement painting? Sure it does!

Yes, sure I know that:)

Was just pointing out a little-known function in Hex to export a bump map for use on a low-poly model - I haven't come across that ability in Carrara.