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  • Published 27 Jun 2020

Bake Cycles Displacement

I am one of many procedural artists that make landscapes and terrains using procedural displacement textures. But eventually, when it comes to using those, it gets really tricky since:

  1. You can't see it in solid shading mode, and only in Cycles rendered mode, which is pretty laggy and tough to use, especially when you have a huge generated landscape with 100+ nodes.
  2. Particle systems ignore the displacement.
  3. You can't use it in Eevee

We need the ability to bake the displacement into the geometry or a shape key. Thanks.

P.S. of course, there are workarounds having various disadvantages like baking into an image texture using MapRange, which requires a UV map and only allows for 256 "steps" due to bitdepth.

some people suggested baking to EXR and yes, it's a better option, but not that much since you still need UV maps

I think this is a lack of an essential feature expected to be there out of the box by everybody that jumps into blender.

Capture.PNG

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 8 Downvote 1
zslit
27 Jun 2020

1 Comment

Displacement to geometry would be a game changer, especially if it can be used as a modifier without having to bake the texture.

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