Help on bump/displacement uber detail

[Anti-Distinctly]

I was lurking through the cgtalk gallery and came across this lovely image:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=353291

I'm doing a similar at the moment, (just no where near as good). I'm concerned with the pavement area at the front, close to the camera. The detail is exquisite, but having looked at the wireframe, it all seems flat in that area.
My question is, does anyonw know how to go about creating this kind of detail? My bump maps allways seem quite 'smooth' looking and lacking in detail, no matter how detailed or high res they actually are.
Was the image above done with displacement maps or is theres some other groovy method that people know of? I can't imagine getting that level of detail looking that good.

Thanks for any replies :)

[BazC]

I would think a good bump map should work for this. Alternatively you could do some super high res sculpting in ZBrush and generate a normal map from it. I don't think there should be any need for displacement though.

[Edu]

Mhhh... by the way, It could be interesting to see the same or similar scene rendered in LW. It looks beautiful and I would like to know how to create some of the atmosferic and light effects right in LW out of the box. I've read the original was made with 3D Max and Photoshop, so in theory, It could be achieved the same quality with LW (and some photoshop trickery)...

As I can see, he have used some real images to recreate the cars... and I suppose for the buildings too. But these amazing soft reclection from the wet ground and this light... Really, I would like to see some hyper-real stuff like this made with light wave.

Meanwhile, if you want to delight your eyes, that man have some astonishing photo-real images in his website at http://denko.maxarea.com/...

[Anti-Distinctly]

Yes he is a talented man (grrr).
Baz: You think that could all be done with just bump mapping? Hmmm, I'll give it a whirl, but the detail just isnt there. I'm using photoshopped photographs for my textures at quite a high resolution, but the surface still looks smooth. Its those crisp edges I seem to have trouble with.

I think that he probably just comped in photoshop and blurred the reflections that way. Well, thats how I'd do it anyway. Blurring reflections is a big thing for me. I wish there was a speedier way to do it in LW. But I could just comp it.

[BazC]

Yes he is a talented man (grrr).
Baz: You think that could all be done with just bump mapping? Hmmm, I'll give it a whirl, but the detail just isnt there. I'm using photoshopped photographs for my textures at quite a high resolution, but the surface still looks smooth. Its those crisp edges I seem to have trouble with.

I would think bump mapping will work fine but I agree getting a high quality bump map is tricky. Definately turn off mip mapping, try increasing the contrast in Photoshop with levels or auto levels. Also sharpening the image may help, I use the High Pass filter. Copy your image layer and run high pass filter on the top copy. Set that layer to overlay and reduce the opacity until you get a satisfactory result.

Finally you may have to set the bump level to more than 100%

Hope that helps!

[UnCommonGrafx]

If you don't like the look of bumping then normal map it.

I've been doing experiments that suggest normal mapping is the 'new' bump map only more 'serious'. ;) So, unplug from the bump and plug into normal and tell us how it looks. Along with all the other tips, should get you quite close.

[Anti-Distinctly]

Ok peoples. It appears that the mip map thing helped somewhat - I'll have to look that one up somewhere as it's not in Leighs book :)
I've attached a few renders. One was just a quick test to see what it'd look like with water in the cracks, so I just added reflection to those parts, but didnt change the bump, so its a bit wrong, but hey.
The second is an FPrime render without the water, hence the stucco texture I made in nodal for the buildings doesnt show up.

UnCommonGrafx, I tried the normal map thing in nodal, but it seemed that the colour channel and normal/bump channel don't align properly which is annoying. I've got a reference object in the scene to scale the texture down and move it about. Have you had any similar problems? I'll post a screen if I have time to wait for the render.

EDIT: Uploaded the nodal texturing image. Just colour image into the colour channel and a bump map mapped to the bump channel. Both are exactly the same (the bump was copied from the colour) except the image. wtf.

[UnCommonGrafx]

I can't say that's what I'm seeing. But it might be.

What I am seeing is that sometimes it seems the feed into normal has to be inverted to get it to look right. Also, seems normal is a lot 'harder' than bump mapping.

[UnCommonGrafx]

And based on your pics, I KNOW I would have tried them as normals to get the darker look (my 'harder' statement above) one wants in crevices and the like.

[Anti-Distinctly]

UnCommonGrafx: See the updated pics in my previous post. The far right is the nodal version - strange things are happening there.

[UnCommonGrafx]

perplexed, indeed! Maybe I have seen it and passed it off as user error...