Hi rickei,
Yes I also have tried that from in my experiments (not using the lowest subd). I did however find that in some cases it is very taxing on the RAM, even though you are only using the "rendering" subdiv 4 in Carrara.
I also agree that you should not enable subdiv in the displacement tab.
In the render I posted I did not fiddle with the
amplitude or
offset at all - left at default. For that matter I did not even bother going to vertex room to smooth the rendering. I did this by merely under the
edit menu in the main carrara scene preview window selected the
smooth object option. There I selected
4 times (rendering) and
1 time subdiv. Not really sure what the difference is between this method and doing it in the vertex room like you suggested.
I also exported and used the lowest subd .obj straight from ZB. This gave me the desired result in this case. I do however agree that it is not always necessary to use the lowest subd model from ZB. In my experience Carrara does have a fairly high tolerance when it comes to high poly counts. If it is able to import models with higher polycounts, and this leads to better results at the end of the day, why not use the higher poly model?
As you correctly point out, Carrara then does not have to displace the model that much.
All in all I suppose that there are many different ways of doing things. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve. Like you said "you will have to tweak it from here".
Thanks for you pointers.
Cheers,
yvan_c