How do you guys go about offsetting strands on displaced objects to follow the surface precisely.
We are working on an animal model with very short hair, and the geometry has a zbrush displacement map applied.

I'm using the same displacement map to push points up or down along their normal to try and match the displaced mesh. It works to a degree, but it's messy and takes time to adjust.

How do you guys solve this problem?

never tried it, but could use use the displacement map(black to white) and rescale to offset the strand(particle) positions?

That is what we are doing and it seems to work ok. It's just a very slow process on 10 mill strands.

It's only slow on the first frame were the strands are going to be generated so that should be okey, no ?
How do you look up the texture value ? Through emitlocation I guess ? (just asking in case you use some sort of closest location or stuff like that).
I don't think there's any other solution except of using the high density mesh itself.

You can envelope your pcloud and copy the weights via scripting (unfortunatelly GATOR doesn't work), there's no need to reevaluate the particle offset in a per frame basis

I don't think enveloping the pcloud will be faster then setting the position in a post simulation stack with emitlocation.pointposition + per point stored displ offset. Envelopes in xsi are single threaded as far as I know.

Would be worth a try to compare the speed differences.

Just tried to compare using an envelope and setting the point position in a post simulation ice tree.

Not sure why but setting the point position in another ice tree is quite a lot faster (with frozen modelling stack envelope 44fps / ice tree 110fps).