50% Grey Midpoint in Maya Diplacement

Maya displacement is something that I avoid using as much as possible.

I've always maintained that my reluctance is because I don't have much experience with sculpting (Though I've used Mudbox a little bit), and that no matter how I do it, greyscale displacement maps never look as nice as a normal map.

That being said, I've discovered that greyscale normal maps don't import into Maya correctly (to my view).

Logically, I would expect a value of 50% grey to not change the displacement of an object at all, while white would be the equivalent of 100% displaced up, and black 100% displaced down.

Maya by default takes black as no displacement and white as 100% displaced up.

In order to fix this, you need to put the following formula into the Alpha Offset slot of the file node which holds the displacement image:

=-0.5*%FILE%.alphaGain

Where %FILE% is the name of the file node (or texture node if you're not using a file). We use the value of -.5 to shift the midpoint down 50% from white to mid grey. 

Your displacement should now work correctly.

Welcome and RenderView Extensions for Maya 2011

Hello and welcome, here we have the brand new blog to be connected with my site. I intend to post updates of work, tidbits of things I find, and links to interesting and useful stuff.

As a kick off, I'd like to make a big shiny cardboard arrow and point it towards RenderView Extensions, a set of scripts you can download from CreativeCrash that make your Maya render view window better and easier to use.

I wanted a way to save all the snapshots I'd made in my render view at once (because I'm lazy and don't like wasting my time on repetitive tasks that I can automate), so I hunted around and stumbled across this which does all that and more (for only $0.00!).

The instructions in the folder are slightly confusing and buried halfway through the readme. Here are better ones:

1. The sz_renderView.mel file from the root directory, then the 3 mel files from the folder labled with the version of Maya you are using (renderWindowPanel.mel, mayaPreviewRender.mel, mentalrayPreviewRender.mel) go into the root of your scripts folder (whatever comes up when you run the mel command getenv "MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH";)

2. The appropriate icons for your version go straight into your icons folder(found by running the mel command getenv "XBMLANGPATH";).

3. Restart Maya

4. Profit