Displacement problem analysisAlright guys so the first problem I'm going to try and tackle in Phantom Architecture is that when modeling architecture, your models are going to have a lot of big flat faces that you will want displacement on, but modeling it 'properly' will seriously hurt workflow because it takes a lot of time and to fix the issues around corners you will need to tessellate the model which makes editing the model later on very difficult and time consuming.
So I've been doing a bit of research and I've broken it down. In the following pic on the left you will see an open cube, no tessellation or anything done on it, just what you would make in an architecture model (I use SketchUp for my building modeling). On the right side you will see the same open cube, but tessellated:
Now when you go ahead and apply displacement to this little scene, you will see that there will be a bunch of gaps in your displacement:
This happens because the displacement follows the normals of your triangles. When these normals are smoothed, you will see that the displacement goes nicely along the edges:
But there still is a problem! If you look at the open cube at the left, you will see that the lighting messes up here (daylight environment). That means that simply smoothing out the model will create clearly visible lighting problems. If you look at the open cube on the right side, you will see that all is good.
So what we need in order to fix this issue is an algorithm that can
automatically look at your model, tessellate faces up to a certain threshold, and then smooth them out. Then your source model is not hurt and exactly the way you like it. But the processed OBJ by Phantom Architecture will then look really good in Octane!
I am working on the algorithm to do this with great ease.