Advice/opinion on cadimage tools

rslt wrote:
I really want to have some form of displacement in Artlantis and would like to know if this could make that happen.

Displacement is a rendering engine trick (algorithm) that allows the illusion of geometry from bitmapped images. Just as bump-mapping gives the illusion of projected surfaces in terms of generated highlights and shadows (but with flat surfaces), displacement can use a grayscale image to actually puff out a surface in an arbitrarily curvy/smooth way - letting stone, for example, on two walls meeting at a corner result in a bumpy corner. Nothing can add displacement to Artlantis until Abvent gives it to us.

The alternative, that you are looking at, is modeling ... which will add many polygons. So, it depends on what it is you want to represent...stone, brick, whatever. Post an image of your goal, and then let people knowledgeable about the Cadimage (and other) tools let you know if it is reasonable to go for it.

Cheers,
Karl

You can get some extremely convincing results out of displacement mapping without all the extra polygons of building an actual model (extra time to model + render).

The advantage of the Cadimage tools is you have all these things modeled and so they can be used in your documentation. I have not used them to do this but i can imagine if you went to the level of detail shown on their site on a large project it would quickly bog your AC file down in 3D type views. Small projects like housing should not be a problem.

They have demo's so try them out first. If you were only using them for rendering i would really recommend pushing displacement map techniques first, but as Artlantis does not have this i guess you don't have many options?

OK here is a pretty good basic overview of displacement mapping for VRay (but generally applicable to any rendering engine that can use displacement mapping).

http://vray.us/vray_tutorials/vray_displacement_mapping_tutorial.shtml

and here is another quick tutorial over at the Pixelab blog