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Help. Multiple displacement animation

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#1

i thought i found this in the FAQ but not sure if this was what im after.

does anyone know anyway of animating a displacemap? im trying to logically think it through but cant seem to think of a solution.

so far what i come to know is. when you animate a low poly object with a displacement, thats fine. but what happens if i want the displacement map to get a new feature like a morphing face? would blend shapes be involved and if so, how?

coz if it was blendshapes i would try the animated version but becoz its a dispalcemnt i have no set target and displacement map are some what ‘invisible’ until rendered.

any advice?. thanks in advance, for reading such an long essay/

#2

you have to be more specific to get good answers,

sometimes questions with great precision get irrelevant answers, imagine without…

3d software for animation?
Subject of animation? (whole body,tentacles, abstract,humanbased face etc…)
What do you want to do?
Specific shaders you may want to use?

also this questions belong to the troubleshooting category.

#3

oh sorry, i was actually looking for somewhere to post this but this was the only place i thought relevant.

the two softwares im using are zbrush 3 and maya 8
i wanted to try and create a morphing head. like when you have blendshapes in maya, but with displacement maps, i guess

so when i create like a slider attribute it changes the face of the model. but not something like changing the alpha gain or filter offset to get a better depth map. i mean to actually change the face itself, so like a skinny face to a fat face?

shaders i think i would want to use the uv map to texture via photoshop.

im still quite new to this.

and admin if possible if you could move this tot eh trouble shooting, thanks

#4

Hi hybrias

Have you tried KineMapper for this?

More about it here:

http://www-viz.tamu.edu/courses/tutorials/gary/what.html

cheers

Chris

#5

i’ve never heard of that, but that does look really interesting.

but a bit too confusing for me. and due to time limitation and stuff, but something like that, but without using mel. perferably using the node system if possible or a blendshape node. as an animator, i cant get my head around stuff like this. but in time hopefully ill check it again. thanks for the tip though

but chris you portfolio is amsing. i really like the 3d dog with his tongue hanging out. and your zbrush stuff… so realistic.

#6

Ok…if for example you want to make a face(humanbased) that is able to express and talks and do whatever you want, you can use blenshapes or a bones system to make every expression you can imagine, and have the detail from the disp. map going along,together with a normal map or a bump map .

If you want to make face that makes all the above but with some minor changes in the mid-high frequency details(wrinkles for example) you could make the same with the blendsahpes but you could assign different maps(bump or normal) to be set driven by the specific blendshape by controlling bump depth. If you want a radical transformation like a humanskin face tranforming to a rockskin monster, you have to make two displacement map that also change along with the base mesh. To be able to do these you have to: have a good topology that it can hold the basic shapes you want to achieve via blenshaping. Uvs know how to render displacement ,normal or bump maps Some shading network knowledge, to connect more than one bump, normal, disp. map to a shader(lambert,blinn, misss fast skin e.t.c) If you don't understand what i'm saying you may need to explore more , how maya nodes work... whatever you do you always have to animate the base mesh(blendshapes via zbrush sculpting and exporting the lower mesh, bones, clusters, combination of everything e.t.c) and is good to involve a a bump or normal map there is also a software plugin that is supposed to work great with animating disp maps called Messiah, but i don't really know anything about, there some books that can help you like Stop Staring 2th edition fom Jason Osipa that it explains some of the things i mentioned, it focus on facial modeling and animation, and works with Maya but tou can do all of these things with Zbrush and retopology tool(for modeling) and continue with Maya there are maybe many ways you can do that and i hope this helped you cheers!
#7

sounds about right. i was going to do it the long way round. i was going to do both animation, then render two different version out. and do a composition illusion.

i wonder if i could actually do a bump map for the littel detail then, activate the displacment over say a time period.

ill have to give that one a try.

but yeah ill have a lookf or those book.s thanks muchies

#8

Thanks hybrias - kind of you :slight_smile:

As a thought; You can use a plusMinusAverage node or a blendColor node for animated displacement maps also :wink:

Chris