Paul Forwood

Very well done! How long did it take you to put all of that together?

It sure does. Its in the latest alpha. You need to name a group for the cross-section, select a spline for the path and then goto plug-ins. Thanks to Emilio and Hash!

Thats looking very promising!

Very nice! It is good to see some portraiture in here for a change. I will enjoy watching your progress.

Cheers, Anders!

Yes. It sounds interesting!

That looks great, Anders! Is it easy to set up your plug-in for a variety of prints?

You don't need a plug-in to do footprints, Ken, just an animated displacement map. Make an action where displacement moves from 0% to 100% over a number of frames.

Zaryin, how many patches are you using for your terrain? I have a theory regarding high render times while viewing displacement at close range. I haven't tested this theory yet so maybe someone who knows could chime in here. My theory rests on the assumption that the resolution of the displaced surface is calculated on a per patch basis. If therefore you use a single patch to generate a large terrain and move the camera close to the surface A:M has to calculate a high resolution displacement for a huge area, most of which is out of shot. If on the other hand you use many patches A:M can cull all the patches that are not within the view and render times should improve. I have yet to test this theory but perhaps someone who knows could clarify the details? Is there any mileage in this theory? I was rendering a camera movement, from far-away to close-up, to a displaced surface and the render times started at about 20 seconds per frame but quickly stepped up for each successive frame until it locked up at over 50 hours for the projected time for completion.

Nice, happy feel to this kitchen but there are a few things that need attention. Check all your wood grain. You currently have much of it running the wrong way. The two glasses on the table would look better if you rearranged them so that they don't look as if one is balancing on the other. ;-) On the whole it's a very nice composition that could do with some tweaking. Well done.

Just gorgeous, Stian!

Yeah, thank you, Matt. I found that thread after posting here.

Matt, I think it is going to take a while to get used to displacement maps and to discover where they can and can't be used. So far I have found them fun to play with but they do slow down interaction unless you turn off decals. Render times are not too bad unless the surfaces with the displacement map are large. I have brought my PC to a halt several times while trying to render. I am getting varying results from my tests which include mixing bump, displacement and colour maps along with particle hair on a large terrain. I have noticed what looks like popping in some tests. If you observe the rocks in the following clip you will see a little of this: [attachmentid=13481] These rocks are modelled and the displacement used to rough them up a little. Bump maps are still very much appreciated by me and I think that I will only use displacement in situations where bumps don't quite cut it. Useful for brick walls, rock, background objects that can be rendered seperately. I'll keep testing them in the hope that I can find a good balance.

Looks good, Mark! I was going to ask what ambient occlusion is. I haven't dared to touch those new properties yet, for fear of getting lost in there for days, but I am keen to try now. I'm not sure if A:M follows the same model but I found this explanation via a Google search: Ambient Occlusion It looks like it will add significantly to render times but I have yet to test it. I'm guessing that this is leading to baking lights into textures but I would love to hear an explanation of it's uses from someone who really knows. More very cool tools! Thanks, Hash Inc!

Thanks, Ken! Haven't been in there in a looooong while.

Thanks, Ken, but that is what I have been doing, adjusting the displacement value on various frames in a choreography, but I can't see any effect.

Can someone explain how to animate the displacement value? I've tried adjusting the distortion value over time but it doesn't seem to work. Does it have to be done with an image sequence/moviefile? Here is another example of the clipping problem: [attachmentid=13375] The terrain is one patch and the water is a six sided box.

Of course!! Thanks again, Will! Ken, I get it sometimes and at others I don't. That might be why things speed up suddenly. At other times everything turns black and it is hard to tell if displacement is drawn or not but it all renders correctly, I think. Saving and reopening the project can often clear this black out.

Also bumps don't show until rendered. Displacement is in realtime so interface response is affected. In a complex scene, with lots of displacement, things might get frustrating, especially on slower machines. For this reason I think it might be useful to provide an ON/OFF button, like particles. I haven't tried really bogging down a scene yet but I'm working on it and haven't reached a point where it gets too slow yet. I have noticed a fluctuation in the realtime response. At times the realtime update seems to struggle a bit and then at others, even after adding more complexity to the scene, the response gets really zippy. So I guess there are some things that will get ironed out eventually as regards speed. Render times are increased over bump maps but not too excessively. I do think bump maps are still very useful. And as was said previously it is just the click of a button to swap back and forth between bumping the surface or displacing it. It all seems very workable to me so far. I'm so enthused about this new enhancement that it still feels like Christmas to me!

You set your projection map's displacement value in the material's properties. It is off by default.

I think this will work well on characters but I have yet to try it. There is problem with the displaced surfaces at extreme angles in close shots, where it gets clipped just inside the camera frame, causing it to look torn. I have only noticed this on single patch tests though so it might not apply to closed geometry. I haven't tested enough to know the limits of displacement mapping but I am sure that we will be seeing some amazing examples of things like water motion, furrowed brows and cloud motion as well as static applications like terrain texturing. It's exciting stuff! Here is a low-res example of the tearing along the bottom edge of the frame: [attachmentid=13330] I didn't even use a greyscale map for the displacement in this test, I just used the colour image as a displacement map too, so the displacement is not correct for the terrain.

Mars does have an atmosphere. Predominantly helium, I think. My Mars was colonised by carneys with high voices. When they left the helium strangely vanished. Meanwhile back on Earth balloon sales were at an all time high.

Absolutely. Also I didn't do any research to find the height of those volcanoes and the diameter of Mars, otherwise I would have rendered a more realistically proportioned version too. Thanks for the links!

Here is an example of A:M 13 alpha 4's displacement via projection mapping in a material: [attachmentid=13321] Matt Bradbury asked to see an example of this. As you can see there are some problems at the moment. I checked the choreography several times and I can asure you that the only thing moving is the rotating planet. No lights move. Okay, here is much the same thing but using the new A:M 13 displacement via decals: [attachmentid=13322] These would be improved by using higher res, uncompressed colour and displacement maps. The ones that Matt provided were pretty low resolution jpeg images.

Great stuff, as usual, John!