If you’ve been around the Redshift block for a while, you’ve probably noticed displacement can be a little… tricky. I see it all the time — artists pull in a displacement map from ZBrush or Mari, plug it into a shader, hit render, and wonder why the result looks like a melted marshmallow instead of crisp sculpted detail. The good news? Once you know the proper workflow in Maya with Redshift, you can get displacement looking exactly like your high-res sculpt — without killing your render times.
Everything starts with a good displacement map. If the map isn’t exported right, you’re already fighting an uphill battle.
In ZBrush, go down to your lowest subdivision level — that’s the base mesh you’ll bring into Maya. Then, switch back up to your highest subdivision level to generate the displacement. Open the Displacement Map menu, set DPSubPix to somewhere between 2–4 for nice clean detail, and Mid Value to 0.5 so Redshift reads it correctly. If you’re doing height displacement, keep it single channel grayscale; for vector displacement, use RGB. And this is important — always export a 32-bit EXR or TIFF. Don’t even think about using an 8-bit PNG. Banding is your enemy here.
Once the map’s baked, export the base mesh as an OBJ or FBX — but make sure your scale matches your Maya scene. ZBrush and Maya don’t talk the same unit language, and if you ignore that, your displacement will come in looking too shallow or blown out.
This is where a lot of people go wrong — they think displacement is just about plugging a map into a material. But in Redshift, the actual geometry subdivision and displacement happen at the object level, inside the Redshift Object node.
So, after importing your base mesh and assigning a Redshift Material, create a Redshift Displacement node. Plug your displacement texture into it, set the color space to Raw, and connect it to the material’s Displacement Shader input. That’s just the shading side.
Now select your mesh, in Redshift tab add a Redshift Object Properties node. This is where the magic happens:
Even with everything hooked up, you’ll probably need to tweak the scale. ZBrush’s displacement height rarely matches Maya one-to-one. A quick way to match is to render a close-up of a known detail from ZBrush and adjust the Scale in the Redshift Displacement node until it matches.
If the map is pushing in the wrong direction, don’t panic — just enable Invert Displacement. And if you see chunks of your geometry clipping away, increase the Bounds Padding a little.
Displacement is heavy. If you’re seeing long render times, try pushing your smallest surface detail — skin pores, fabric weave, micro scratches — into a normal map and use displacement only for big shapes and silhouette changes. This combo gives you 90% of the look for a fraction of the render cost.
Always test your displacement on a simple turntable before lighting and shading the whole shot — this makes it easy to spot scale, direction, or clipping problems before you get too far. And don’t overdo the subdivision — more levels aren’t always better. Start low and go up only as much as the shot demands.
Bottom line: Displacement in Redshift isn’t just “plug and pray.” If you take control of your export settings in ZBrush, set up the material and the Redshift Object Node properly in Maya, and fine-tune the scale and bounds, you can get results that are dead-on to your sculpt and optimized for production.
