User:Maiself/Micropolygon Displacement

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Cycles Subdivision and Displacement

Goal of this project is to enable artists to create highly detailed surfaces with less effort and resources compared to normal modeling techniques.

Note

This feature is under active development and should be considered experimental. Settings may be added and removed as development progresses; it is recommended to avoid use in production until things become more finalized.

Cycles Subdivision & Displacement

Subdivision Rate

Global scene settings

Render: Micropolygon size in pixels for the final render
Viewport: Micropolygon size in pixels for the viewport render
Offscreen Scale: Automatically reduces the amount of micropolygons outside of the "camera view" (higher values will produce less/larger micropolygons)
Max Subdivisions:
Dicing Camera:

Subdivision Rate: 100, 50, 25, 12, 6, 3

Offscreen Scale: 1, 4, 10, 20 (A different camera was used for dicing to show the effect better)

Object settings

Adaptive: Enable/Disable Adaptive subdivision
Dicing Scale: Multiplier for the scene dicing rate
Final Dicing Rate: Final dicing values (Subdivision Rate * Dicing Scale)
Subdivide UVs: Not supported at the moment

Simple: The mesh is subdivided in a linear fashion, preserving its shape, this may be useful for example on walls in an architectural render.
Catmull-Clark: This subdivision produces smoothed meshes, good for characters, organic models, or models designed for use with this type of subdivision.

Base Mesh, Simple, Catmull-Clark

Displacement Method

Displacement Method found in the material settings

Bump Only:
Displacement Only:
Displacement and Bump

Bump Only, DIsplacement Only, Displacement and Bump

Displacement Nodes

Space: World or Object
Height:
Midlevel:
Scale: Multiplier for the strength of the displacement
Normal:

Displacement Node

Space: Tangent, World or Object
Vector:
Midlevel:
Scale: Multiplier for the strength of the displacement

Vector Displacement Node

Displacement Output:

Displacement Output

Mean Crease

Crease Setting

Edge with different crease values: Base Mesh, 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6

Tips

no abrupt changes in shader, use smoothstep or other smoothing functions instead
prefer quad only meshes, use creases sparsely...
formula to calculate the amount of polys with a rate < 1 -> 1/(dicing rate ^ 2)
multiply the displacement input by 10 to get the correct result (2.78)