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Trying out displacement mapping in 3dsmax 2013 I noticed some strange artifacts perhaps?

1) When zoomed very close in you can see strange stacks of polygons rather than a smooth interpolated surface. Maybe this is a limitation of the method used?

2) I get strange cracks on a simple displacement mapped plane. At first I thought it was the UV's causing repeating and some sort of UV border wrap issue but as it's just a default 3dsmax plane the UV's shouldn't be repeating so I don't think it's that?

cybernoid wrote:Trying out displacement mapping in 3dsmax 2013 I noticed some strange artifacts perhaps?

1) When zoomed very close in you can see strange stacks of polygons rather than a smooth interpolated surface. Maybe this is a limitation of the method used?

2) I get strange cracks on a simple displacement mapped plane. At first I thought it was the UV's causing repeating and some sort of UV border wrap issue but as it's just a default 3dsmax plane the UV's shouldn't be repeating so I don't think it's that?

1) This is a limitation.
2) Is original surface smooth?

I actually just created a default plane primitive in 3dsmax and stuck a material with displacement map on it. I will double check if there is different behaviour depending on whether it is subdivided or not and whether the number of subdivisions effect it.

I should probably mention I updated to the latest nVidia drivers from their website today (337.88).

Yes it seems the cracks coincide with the plane subdivisions - by default it was set to 4 in each direction. I increased the subdivisions in the attached render and the cracks moved with it.

I tried dropping an edit poly on top of the plane and screwing with smoothing groups but that didn't seem to do anything.

My scene scale/units in 3dsmax are all set to metres.

Also ticking invert in the material editor for the image doesn't seem to invert the displacement. Otherwise it's looking quite cool