1. 
   I am not a modeller to this degree. So the concept is alien to me. So I ask.

I read this... "When creating a vector displacement map, your model’s currently selected subdivision level is compared with with the details of its highest level. It then calculates a map that represents the differences between the two levels, capturing the details of the high-level sculpt."

With that said will Vector Displacement Maps be of any use to an iClone user who does NOT model in 3DS or ZBrush or any of the multitudes of other hi level Modelling software?

W.E.C.S.
That is to say, from what I understand, Vector Displacement maps wont be something I can create myself from scratch using iClone. In much the same way as iClone's UV Ref. system is unbeneficial unless you model external to iClone.

Armstrong.

Maybe iClone 6?

Ive just watched the tessellation video about 6 times.  

and I have to say it's very exciting.

For the time it's been around there sure are pathetic few Displacement maps online. Actually about none.
The above image is impressive.

My excitement comes in with a question.

I would like to think that now at last we can have land masses that cavern, reach up and across and not just go upwards buit outwards as well.
Well tex'd these landmasses would surpass anything iClone has ever seen yet.

BUT...... as an animator NOT a modeller (in the true sense of the word) I must say that if someone doesn't make the landmass to begin with then the Vector Displacement map wont come to be either. )

My question....
Does this mean that when buying (for instance) a landmass/landscape we simply buy the image that makes it become what it is?

I worry that iClone, from being a stand alone animation tool, beautiful in that it showed evolution as being an Animating engineering arena, seems hellbent on becoming some kind of accessorised appendage to modelling software ten times its price.
It careers in a strange direction to me. I want to animate but every time I see something that really inspires, like tessellation, it comes to light that, as an animator, your in this weird minority world of second priority creatures and the word "Economical production" dies death after death because modelling AND animation are two clocks running accumulatively doubling what should have been an appetiser to £$ potentials.

The scars and facial deformations in the tessalation iClone 6 progress video and the ability to texture in such a manner are very exciting but not if I have to make them in an external modelling software initially.
And time and again the animator has to wait extortionate amounts of time for Mud to put avatars on while everyone  is oohing and aahing at stubble and clonecloth textures.

Tessalation of course in the wide scope IS for the animator. But at the leisure of someone else being bothered.
I look forwards to the next instalment of iClone Work in Progress and really hope it has something for the animator wholly leaving him or her a degree of independence in creativity  because while iClone is affordably economical, it's continually coming to light that, actually, to deploy and participate with productions that use all its features you actually have to spend quite a few more thousand pounds and dollars and clock out of the Working world for a few years to learn fluently a modelling program after which your sales tack just halved its effectivity against the clock.

The Animator is hanging by a thread of confidence that the independence they need will appear somewhere up ahead and wont keep designing itself at every turn around the whim of external modellers.

Armstrong.