Advanced textures

[Peter Milner]

A couple of questions about advanced textures:

What do the settings under displacement mapping do - how do they affect the texture?

When using a specular map, should the base material have any reflectivity or is it all controlled by the map?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'm assuming you're asking for nXtRender.  It's been a long time since I've looked at this stuff-- here's what I can remember:

Displacement mapping changes the underlying geometry using a texture.  It's an expensive procedure, but can sometimes be worth it.  It has three settings-- one for the height of the thing, one which controls the size of each element in the newly formed mesh (this one affects performance a lot), and one which controls where the displacement begins.  This third setting I think goes from -1.0...0.0 and default to -0.5.  At 0, the displacement begins on the surface itself and moves "up" from there (in the direction of the surface normal.)  At -1, all of the displacement is "below" the surface.

For the Specular question I'm assuming you mean Specular Intensity.  This will respond to the Strength setting in the map.  If you set the strength to < 1.0 then the materials base Specularity will contribute some.  Otherwise the map should do it all.

Let me know if I'm wrong here.  It's somewhat different under ArStudio.