New Study: Spore III

Did a little Vector Displacement Map test using the beta of Mudbox 2011, it is so cool to be able to just paint geometry onto another surface like this.



I started by making this geometric shape in mudbox into a brush...



And here’s the resulting vdm brush



I then started with a fresh sphere, and stamped this vdm all over it. I then used the "Fill" brush to place the more noisy detail on the surface of the sphere without affecting the bubbles. That was using a custom stamp using the reaction diffusion KPT filter in photoshop.

Then exported the result to 3dsmax (The full highres mesh, since neither brazil nor mentalray in max have a good way to use VDM displacing yet). Added the microscope shader, which includes a small bump map, and rendered in Brazil, slight tweaking and compositing in photoshop.