hope everyone can understand due to my lack of expertise in my English language skill.

My suggestion on the layers is,

to make the layer independent from the level subdivision. Its annoying to have one layers that is lock only to one level.

and would it be nice if we have in mudbox a layers that could be dedicated for displacement map detail (big details)

and normal details (smaller finesse details). Right not since every layers multiplying each other this kind of workflow doesn’t exist.

so we could get a separate maps for normal mapping detail and displacement map detail.

since most of the time, the big rough detail and smaller one is baked together, resulting in subdividing a 4 millions poly in maya that makes it impossible to render. imagine an insanely detailed creatured at 4 millions or even more, and then tries to subdivide the samething in maya its just fairly hard to render.

also would be nice to have a map extraction tool that work as good and as fast as zbrush multi displacement 3 plugins.

i will elaborate more if anyone has any question.

best

http://rwijaya.blogspot.com/

rwijaya
You can separate out you fine details from the heavy details with some clever use of the baking process. For instance you can export out the high res mesh with the “detail” layer turned off, and then export it with details turned on.  Bake those two against each other to isolate that fine detail for normal map or whatever.  Also some renderers will generate displacement at render time in an optimized way… So you don’t have to subdivide and displace before render time.  In Vray for max I can usually get away with having all the details in the map, the only thing that seems to be a limitation is the map size.  Look into this too..  I would still recommend using normal maps as much as you can get away with it.  but that helps alot.

But I agree with your suggestions the layers could sue some work, and I am sure 2.0 wont disappoint in that area, lets see..

http://www.justin-lloyd.com

btw:  the base layer is independant of subdivision level....it is the additional layers that have this limitation.  I suspect there is a technical limitation to this.

I agree that having layers locked to subdivision levels is annoying.  It wouldn’t be so bad if we could at least turn off or on layers that are on different levels without changing the current level.  I also wish we could merge individual layers into the base layer without having to use flatten which gets rid of all of the other layers too.