Displacement like feature

Xuaxinodal

One topic I have seen posted about is the use of displacements and I had an idea which I think wouldn't take much to simulate displacements.

Essentially the engine treats everything like a displacement/mesh so I was thinking it would be nice if one could select a face and then run a subdivide/chop function on it such that it divides the selected face into a bunch of smaller triangular faces. A dialog window would let the user specify the chop size as well as any other options needed.

Something like this would be a lot easier to use than creating and connecting each vertex by hand.

noisymonk

If I'm properly understanding what you're trying to say, I think you're looking for terminology more along the lines of 'Tesselation' - which typically means 'Subdivide Faces'. This is a relatively simple action to achieve and I'm sure that they could easily add it once they find the time.

Displacement however is more along the lines of 'pushing/pulling/reshaping' geometry. So are you possibly referring to what Hammer had for 'painting' terrain?

Xuaxinodal

My original idea was more along the lines of sub-dividing but being able to do the displacement shaping features would be a bonus.

Chris0132

If you don't add displacement tools and just add a turbosmooth button which is what you're suggesting it's likely to look rather poor regardless of what you do to it. There's a reason nobody who's any good at modelling uses turbosmooth except in rare instances.

noisymonk

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->There's a reason nobody who's any good at modelling uses turbosmooth except in rare instances.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

o.O

I guess if you call high poly modeling for normal maps rare, then you'd be right. Obviously Sculpting apps (Zbrush/Mudbox) are the tools of choice of organic shapes, but for any sort of technical model, using Turbosmooth in Max is pretty much required.

Also, thats not what he was asking for. He just wants to be able to Subdivide a face so that it has more Verts/Edges to work with, as opposed to creating those Verts/Edges manually.