I’m using Maya to render out a greyscale image TIFF 16bit for use in Mudbox as ‘Sculpt Using displacement’. The background is set to 0.5 grey and rendered as TIFF 16 from Maya. However, when applied as a sculpt using ‘displacement’ in Mudbox, the mesh slightly inflates (or deflates actually) every so slightly.

Is the issue cuases by my mid grey from Maya , tiff format or something else ?

thanks

Ben

mudbox works best with 32bit tif files…

in 2012 SAP you should be able to set the mid falue…
there is a advanced option for if you are using 16bit files…

Advanced
For regular displacement maps, the following options let you set additional values to tweak the displacement effect.

Mid value
Regular displacement maps store a distance value that indicates how much each surface point moves up or down. If you are applying an integer-based color map (8 or 16 bits per channel), enter the value that represents 0, or no change. For example, setting this value to 128 means that any color brighter than 128 pushes a surface up, while any color darker pushes the surface down.

Multiplier
Multiplies the effect of the offset, so that the effect of displacement is increased or lessened. By default, the default value of 1 represents no change.

Mask Map
Click to browse and select another texture map to attenuate or block the effect of the source displacement map. White areas in the applied Mask Map let the effect of the displacement through, while darker areas reduce the effect.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/christoph-schaedl/6/558/73b

The problem was TIFF compression. I rendered instead using Mental Ray in Maya, OpenEXR format, with the framebuffer set to 16bit(Half), works fine then.