Displacement 50% grey - No touchy!

Displacement mapping should be simple enough. Used a 4092 texture map at 50% grey for base, 16bit & 8bit. Followed this tutorial http://mayazest.blogspot.sg/2012/03/simple-displacement-mapping-in-v-ray.html and tried -0.5 for displacement shift which gave a worse off result. 

Can't seem to have 50% grey leave the geometry alone. Why?

Linear Workflow for Vray

Discussions about linear workflow specifically for V-ray.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=6931633#post6931633

Zbrush Pipeline

Been testing my Maya 2010 -> Vray 1.5 with Zbrush 4 pipeline. Results haven't been completely stellar but we are getting there. Typing out my solution to remember.

Model a standard polygon model in Maya and maintain quads. If there is a hole in the model. Go to Tool -> Geometry -> Crease

Subdivide once if geometry has triangles to turn model into a 100% quad model. Use this subdivided version as level 1 now if this has been done.

Now -
Tool -> UV Map -> Delete UV
Tool -> UV Map -> AUVTiles

Do you painting and export the lowest level mesh as .obj
Now go to your lowest level of the model and to create the displacement map

Tool -> Displacement Map (use adaptive and smooth UV options on)

Now in photoshop
Edit -> Color Settings -> Gray -> Gray Gamma 2.2 (If done right. The gray value in the background areas of that texture will be kept at 129.)
Image -> Image Rotation -> Flip Canvas Vertical

Now Save the file with options "As a Copy" & check the "ICC Profile: Gray Gamma 2.2"

Links below included a reply from Cgbeige -> this allows you to scale the model and have the displacement maps hold up.

CgTalk

Vray is my jungle.

O.M.G.

For 720p version

So further development into the relationship. Been stress testing vray to see if it can handle previous jobs done with MentalRay. Sure seems like Vray plays way friendlier.

The first image was a close up of the tree proxies. There is about 14 trees at 50k polygons each. One tree. Vray was steady as hell.

Second image, if I am not wrong, took 10:32 hours to render but the resolution is 1080HD which is pretty much 2k for the second image, I tried to calculate the number of polygons but my calculator started giving me *to the power of* digits. But its around the range of 6k trees at 50k polygons each.

Lastly, the video clips. Started testing to see if I can have a flicker free solution. Good folks at Cgtalk pointed me in the right direction on this one. Rendering Walk-through animations & more info on the Image Samplers. The final equation was Irradiance Map for primary bounce and Light Cache for secondary bounce. I am very happy right now.

The last clip just had my jaw drop. Bucket rendering over 3 render slaves at a speed of 11min a frame. Sadly, as short as that sounded, 50 frames meant approximately 6 hours.

Vray is Love.

I am literally in love with Vray. I have invested countless months reading and expanding my knowledge on MentalRay. Yes MentalRay is powerful and yes it can do wonders but damned. Vray just works. It works like a freaking box of color pencils. It is obvious and it is fun. It has put a smile back on my face.

I will still use MentalRay when I have too while I slowly let the knowledge i've invested in it for linear workflow, deex render passes etc etc die.

The framebuffers / renderpasses from Vray are a freaking godsend. I am currently using the evaluation copy of Vray. But I am pretty damned sure I am going to make this purchase.

Last thing to look into is what to use for my render management. It will be a little trickier as I need to keep cost low. But still!

Vray is love.