thank you for your reply,
Yes i figured that within the same shader Mantra has to deal with the same geometry and within the shader there cannot be ‘new’ geometry created.
So basically, from the moment i press “render” on the mantra node, the dicing step is applyed always and only once, no matter how many displace along normals i add, is this correct ?
Or maybe is performed per shader ?
I was wondering if, in case it's performed per shader, maybe there was a way to stack/layer shaders in order to perform several real dicings (one per shader, and each shader contains only 1 displace along normal).
Thank you for shedding some light on the gigantic black hole of my ignorance about Mantra (which is the coolest render engine ever, there !)
andrewc
There's no way in mantra to run displacements in sequence as you describe - you'd need to build up the displacement layers in a single shader. Redicing just measures the size of the displaced geometry and makes a decision on how finely to dice the final mesh based on this trial evaluation, but it's running the same displacement in both cases (to produce the measured and final displaced points).
Andrew