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Description
I have seen people trying to render terrains using Poser and having encountered troubles with high polygon counts.

The message is: you do not need millions of polygons to render a (apparently) detailed terrain.

The way of doing so is to use normal mapping.

The posted deviation shows a detail of a terrain generated with GeoControl 2 and rendered with Poser Pro 2012.

At the top you see a wireframe render of the terrain: each square is a single polygon (the original terrain contains 128x128 quads).

In the center you see a straightforward render. Not exactly exciting, isn't it?

At the bottom you see the effect of adding a 4096x4096 normal map. The flat terrain suddenly becomes full of small details. Note that the actual geometry that Poser is rendering is still the original 128x128 quads, so it is really light in Poser.

There are a few shading artifacts but this is understandable: the ratio between the apparent resolution and the actual one is 32:1. I deliberately exagerated the ratio, in a realistic situation I would go for a ratio of 8:1 or 16:1 equivalent to an apparent mesh resolution ~100 higher than the actual one, in the current case is 1024 times higher.

In the next part of the tutorial I will show you how to setup the material in Poser material room.

Description
I have seen people trying to render terrains using Poser and having encountered troubles with high polygon counts.

The message is: you do not need millions of polygons to render a (apparently) detailed terrain.

The way of doing so is to use normal mapping.

The posted deviation shows a detail of a terrain generated with GeoControl 2 and rendered with Poser Pro 2012.

At the top you see a wireframe render of the terrain: each square is a single polygon (the original terrain contains 128x128 quads).

In the center you see a straightforward render. Not exactly exciting, isn't it?

At the bottom you see the effect of adding a 4096x4096 normal map. The flat terrain suddenly becomes full of small details. Note that the actual geometry that Poser is rendering is still the original 128x128 quads, so it is really light in Poser.

There are a few shading artifacts but this is understandable: the ratio between the apparent resolution and the actual one is 32:1. I deliberately exagerated the ratio, in a realistic situation I would go for a ratio of 8:1 or 16:1 equivalent to an apparent mesh resolution ~100 higher than the actual one, in the current case is 1024 times higher.

In the next part of the tutorial I will show you how to setup the material in Poser material room.