All the displacement examples I find online are on simple single surfaces, and indeed, when I follow the tutorials, it does work.
But as soon as I try with a polysurface, or -god forbid- an organically shaped mesh, well, I can hear the computer’s fans-a-hummin’, but there is absolutely no displacement happening, even after the orange banner becomes green.
Something tells me that it is a rudimentary toy, just here to allow McNeel to check the “displacement” item in the feature list.
Either that, or there is a serious problem with displacement in the latest version of Rhino 8.
You have to use the geometry displacement tab, not the PBR material property. You will likely need a refined custom mesh for this.
I think for WIP, the displacement property within PBRs is a working feature. But for Rhino 8, it still needs to be separated into the displacement tab for the object.
Hi @osuire
The geometry in your file hasn’t been UV unwrapped, so Rhino (or any other 3D application) has no idea as to how you want the displacement to be positioned. This goes or any geometry and any material map, like color, bump, roughness etc.
Simple objects made in Rhino, like spheres, boxes, planes etc. have a simple UV map applied, but anything organic has to be UV unwrapped using the Unwrap command and the UV editor. There’s a great video by @BrianJ on the subject:
The issue was small polygons combined with the distance set in the displacement property. It will work at a distance of 8 units as is. To get it to displace to 20 units as you had set, I used ReduceMesh to reduce down to 150k polygons. This had the effect of removing the super tiny polygons that I believe were causing an issue. The 20 unit displacement then works as shown.
I tried with my base SUB-D, then a NURBS, with various custom render mesh settings, then directly a mesh, and various displace values, but got absolutely no result (and no warning, or any other kind of helpful message).
This displacement thing seems so un-robust that I consider it a waste of time.
