displacement mapping

[interstellar]

I'm using a displacement map to make a moon. The resolution for the scene is 3840 x 2160. The map is a digital elevation image from NASA, measuring 11,520 x 5760 pixels. The moon is an uber-shape sphere; in the plugin, the latitude and longitude are both set to 3,600 (Camera). The Camera is set to 64 bit Architecture and Memory is set at 8,000 Mb. The attached picture is a closeup of the nearest part of the moon to the Camera. It's a composite; in the top, the NASA map is used as a bump map rendered with Phong. In the bottom image, the NASA map is used as a displacement map and is rendered in Raytrace.

Using the map as a bump gives a nice image and doesn't require a sphere with so many polygons but raytrace rendering gives me nice shadows. The raytrace rendering must be done with "smooth" disabled on the sphere's uber-shape; unfortunately, the polygons are visible in the picture. The Camera crashes if I divide the sphere any more than 3,600 x 3,600. Is there a way to set this up so the polygons aren't visible in a raytrace render? Thanks for your help!

 

Joe

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Joe!

Really Nice render.. Camera crashes with huge density Ubershape I guess, try this, make Ubershape more dense to try it, but export as a fact and re-import and try to render it.

Thanks

Tom

[interstellar]

Thank you very much, Tomas. I'll try that.

CIao,

Joe

[joseph56]

Would the Dicer plugin be useful here?

In other words, let the plugin increase the resolution of the sphere?