For Other Blender Users: Quantized Artifacts On Displacement

SickleYield

(I haven't found a Blender subforum, so I put it here. I apologize if this is the wrong place.)

Okay, I'm at my wits' end with this and neither the blender forums nor the wiki nor Google seems helpful. I'm trying to help a friend establish a workflow for generating displacement directly from Blender 2.69 (I now use Zbrush, but I wouldn't mind having this option, too).

Our problem is that the generated displacement map is unacceptable for commercial use because of repeating square artifacts on it, with size of artifact being proportional inversely to the number of faces in the base resolution (cube gets big artifacts, shirt gets small artifacts). A pic is attached.

So far the workflow I"m going on is this:

Import or build UV-mapped obj. Check normals are facing out properly.

Add multiresolution modifier. Increase to 5.

Sculpt at 5.

Turn preview down to 1.

Go to UV/IMage editor in Edit mode and add the plain black image with 32 bit float.

In Object mode, go to the Bake panel and choose Displacement, using the "bake from multires" and 'low resolution" options with a margin of 16.

Bake.

I get a displacement map, but it's not usable because of repeating square artifacts in the final displacement map. This is replicable across different blend files and even starting from sculpting a cube or a flat plain. Can I get rid of this, or is it back to baking to normal map and decomposing to channels to get displacement that way?

mjc1016

Hmmm...I haven't tried baking displacement maps in Blender, so I'm not going to be much help, but which version/build of Blender?

SickleYield

Version 2.69.

mjc1016

I've still got 2.64 installed...I was planning on updating soon, so I'll check it out after I do.

In 2.64, I get it too, if I have Low Resolution enabled, but if I don't it puts out a nice smooth map.

kitakoredaz

yes,, in 2.69 when I check off Low resolution mesh,under bake button in Render property ,
it seems bake smooth displacement map.

if I chedk on it, I find grid in baked texture too.