I seem to be running into an issue with displacement lately. I had not come into contact with this before because I usually bake displacement maps onto meshes which are still decently dense. However, I have been meaning recently to bake onto much sparser meshes and have been running into displacement accuracy problems. Pictured here is a demonstration of the issue :
On the right, you can see the cube base geometry, with fully smooth normals, and the sphere geometry which was used to create the displacement. On the left, the end result when the displacement map baked using the sphere is applied to the cube geometry in an Octane material. The cube geometry on the right and left is strictly identical. Unfortunately, no amount of playing with options and gamma values has managed to fix this. This was a problem that I originally noticed in Octane for Cinema4D, but it was actually simpler to recreate rigorously in Houdini. I also first noticed this issue when importing Megascan assets into C4D. When using displacement, the underlying and uncontrolled smoothing which Octane seems to apply to meshes before displacement prevents them from displacing accurately. As a result, artefacts are produced like polygonal ridge patterns which reflect the topology of the sparse underlying mesh.
I am seeing this with the Houdini Octane Studio plugin version 2021.1.1.0.4. Is this expected behavior ?
Thanks all
