Why is blender's shader displacement set-up so complicated?
In Blender Octane you just have to plug a texture into the displacement input of a shader (using one additional node) and the shader displacement works. In Cycles you have to do all these steps:
- make sure experimental render features are on
- add subd modifier, choose simple, turn on adaptive subd
- plug displacement texture into the shader
- go to material properties, settings and turn on displacement or displacement and bump
Also, one must specifically add a subd modifier to every object (and choose Simple and turn on Adaptive Subd) to have shader displacement work, even though the material already has displacement set up. Why?
Can't it be just one step and always working for every object with that material?
2 Comments
For point 1, that's only if you need adaptive subdivision (which you don't have to), and this is temporarily hidden without the experimental feature sets because it isn't a finished feature yet. Once it is fully done, this step shouldn't be required.
For point 2, does Octane automatically generates new geometry as soon as you plug a texture in its displacement? Does it have options to control that, and how is it implemented in the UI?
Because I am not sure if it's a good behavior to have new geometry automatically, unless there's a thorough user control.
Point 4, totally agree on removing it. I don't even understand why there is an option to treat displacement as bump to begin with, and we already have all the nodes needed for adding bump data. Displacement just should be displacement.
Displacement and bump should be on by default.