Softimage 2012 supports vector displacement natively!

[mocaw]

Down a little further on the list is vector displacement, which you could do before threw a third party node, but now with it more widely distributed, I think will get used more. AFAIK mudbox and 3DC are the only applications that currently generate such maps. Maybe a good time to press into the SI front and sell some 3DC licenses eh?

http://area.autodesk.com/softimage2012

I really think this is only a positive for 3DC.

[Javis]

Cool, thanks for the heads up on this.

[Imhotep397]

Whether this is useful for 3DCoat users kind of depends on whether:

A.)3DCoat and Softimage actually make compatible vector map profiles so that the functionality of transferring readable data from one app to the other would be there.

and

B.)AutoDesk makes available a viable pathway for the transfer of vector displacement maps in a "transfer format" like their FBX file format or openly accepts a generic Vector displacement image map file from any application.

The reason I mention all of this is because vector displacement map generation, as a technology, is apparently fairly old. I believe Maya, as an application and mental ray as a renderer have recognized vector displacement maps for quite a while (possibly Lightwave has too, but I'm not sure how long.) I think it goes as far back as 2004 or maybe even earlier. In both cases (Maya, mental ray) vector map based displacement was in the code, but none of the stuff was accessible via the interface. Essentially it was there for studios with lots of coders and/or third party developers.

Luxology was the first company to actually build a GUI front end to create/edit vector based displacement in Modo for user controlled sculpting purposes. Modo vector displacement sculpting happened around the time when MudBox just started their closed Beta program, well before Skymatter was acquired by AD and well before they developed vector displacement techniques for sculpting in the software. The macro view of this is that there are four or more companies that have had vector displacement mapping integrated into their software for between 3 to 7 years and there still is not a standard way to reliably move vector displacement maps between the apps that already have this functionality as far as I know. The conspiracy theorist in me says that it's intentionally this way, because software devs don't want people using apps other than theirs. On the other hand it may just be a situation where because vector displacement is just now being used in a more visible medium like sculpting maybe now more effort will be made to facilitate transferring vector displacement images in the same kind of way normal maps are. We'll have to wait and see. I won't lie, personally I don't think it's going to happen, because AD is really only interested in getting vector displacement maps from Mudbox into their other apps.