Displacement map baking with V-Ray in Houdini is possible through the V-Ray BakerTool.
The creation process is done in two render steps: first, we create a render element that contains information about the position of each point of the lowRes object in space. Then, we make a render element with information about the normals of the lowRes object.
As a final step, we render the HighRes object displacement map onto the LowRes object.
The geometry creation process is not a subject to this tutorial.
You can download an example scene from the download buttonbelow.
Connect the LowRes object node to the left input of the V-Ray BakerTool node.
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For this purpose, the lowRes object needs to have UVs and normals. The V-Ray BakerTool needs to be in Baking mode "Maps Baking".
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The GenerateHeight node is a custom node that takes care of the following settings:
Extend Range - The value here should be higher than the biggest expected distance between the two meshes at any given point.
Clear_artifacts - This remap's purpose is to clear the closest places between the meshes, but because of the difference in the density, that will create an edgy effect. So let's leave the two most distal points (that's 0 and 1) and create a new point with Position 0.01. Set its Value to 0.
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If the Position is bigger than 0.01, the displacement map will be badly clamped.
