OTOY Forums

I'm trying to create a shader with displacement based on the Falloff map, but when I connect the Falloff map node, displacement breaks.

Here is a simplified version of the shader (gradients are there just to enhance the effect).
Is there something I'm doing wrong or Falloff map just won't work with displacement at all?

Perhaps the Baking node doesn't create a suitable image. You might examine the image it does produce if that;s how it works.

Yes, Baking Texture seems like it's not processing Falloff map for some reason. Noise, for instance, looks same with or without Baking Texture, but Falloff, when connected to it, results in white texture. But without Baking Texture, none of them would work on Displacement.

Is there any other way to connect Falloff to Displacement?

lcetina wrote:Yes, Baking Texture seems like it's not processing Falloff map for some reason. Noise, for instance, looks same with or without Baking Texture, but Falloff, when connected to it, results in white texture. But without Baking Texture, none of them would work on Displacement.

Is there any other way to connect Falloff to Displacement?

This is one of the weaknesses of Octane's node system, in my opinion; it does not explicitly tell you what kind of data input each pin needs, what kind of output data each node produces, or any way of converting between them.

If I recall correctly, the only way I've been able to use Octane Falloff with Displacement is to bake out the Falloff values into bitmaps, then bring them back in as Image Textures.

As far as I can tell, the falloff responds to the current sample world matrix. I have found that you can't bake it to a texture, seemingly because of this. If the sample, for displacement, is in normal space (oriented to the surface) it will return the same value no matter where its sampled. I'm assuming this based on its behavior and maybe one of the engineers at OTOY could explain it better or in more detail. I'd love for this to work; both with displacement and baking (given a world space sample location/transform i.e. the camera).

Hi,
this is an octane limitation, and probably more easy to figure out in Standalone than in plugin, since the Texture nodes are subdivided in groups: Basically, due to how they are calculated, both Displacement and Baking texture nodes are not working with Geometric textures nodes.

ciao,
Beppe

There may be a reason this won't work for you, but I just dropped the baking node and switched to vertex displacement.