Cineversity

Please excuse my ignorance here but i’m confused about the displacement maps generated by Cinema 4d’s Bake sculpt objects command. the resulting texture is a colored image. Aren’t displacement maps grayscale? whats going on here? is it possible to output a grayscale displacement map from cinema?

Thanks in advance!

Nathan

Hi Nathan,

There are several options.

Grayscale (Intensity)
The value is expressed as absolute hight from the original point position and only in positive values. A second version (centered) uses mid gray value for the original point position and has the option to move the point “up” and “down”.

RGB
The values express an X,Y,Z position and allows so to overcome limitations of the gray values, as they are only “up” and eventually “Down” values for a specific point.
In this way, points can move relatively free and even on top of each other. The downside is, the are not really editable anymore in an image app, gray values are more “human-readable”.

The RGB or XYZ values are differentiated in RGB (XYZ Object), RGB (XYZ World) and RGB (XYZ Tangent)

There are subsets of color based Displacement maps available, kind of Double Gray versions in Red and Green, for up or down values. Mostly, from my point of view, to overcome the 8bit/channel limitations.

I highly recommend for critical work 16bit/channel (at least) and never color profile these channels, they are data channels and do not need a gamma or a log curves applied to them. 32bit/channel/float and linear is certainly the best way to do it now. OpenEXR as format is the industry standard.

Your question: if you really want to use grayscale (Intensity), your result will be eventually different, in some cases heavily, from the sculpting result you had. Yes, you can go to “Settings” in the Sculpt-Bake-Menu and set what you like to have.

All the best

Thank you very much for your reply. Your answer helped to clear up my confusion. I have a follow up question that might be relevant here. I have used Mudbox in the past to extract displacement maps with are grayscale. Mudbox can also generate vector displacement maps which are RGB. Do you know if these vector maps are equivalent or at least similar to the RGB displacement maps that Cinema creates?

thanks again

Nathan

You’re welcome, Nathan.

Besides older problems, with previous versions and the mix of both apps, based on questions I got here, there were certainly some issues. With current releases of both apps there should be no problem. I have googled the theme to gather some random information and it appears to me that the formula is: the older the app the more chances one has a for problem. Which I would call a quick googling and not a research. But given some YouTube videos, even the back and for with millions of segments worked.

If you have to work in such a pipeline, perhaps set some tiny cubes into space, and sculpt the object (e.g., a sphere) with all kind of shapes so they touch these cubes as measurement, then go to the other app and see if they touch.  ..and after some minor tweaks, go back to the initial app.

It might be time to request an tutorial about, I couldn’t find any here.

All the best

Sassi