What you'll learn

In Maya tutorial, we will learn how to take full advantage of the displacement rendering features of Maya, allowing us to render highly-detailed surfaces with little effort. Displacement maps are especially practical for users of ZBrush or Mudbox, who want to render their highly detailed creations in Maya with the utmost speed and efficiency. We will begin this tutorial by learning the basic steps of connecting your displacement maps and controlling the strength of your rendered displacement effects. From there, we will learn about Approximations, and the critically-important role they play in controlling the speed and quality of our rendered displacement effects. Along the way, we will help you identify and work through a number of common displacement-related issues that you may encounter when working on your own projects. Software required: Maya 2012.