Let's see some moves...animating with displacement

[Taron]

Well, it’s time again to show some new experiments. This time I put some focus on animating with the ZBrush maps. But not just deforming the geometry and being happy that the displacement still works, no, instead using zbrush to create animatable details. But first, let’s have a look at some of the results.

“Neckling” in motion(quicktime)

facts:
340 polygons
color map and displacement maps created in ZBrush!

3 displacement maps: base map, eye-support map, detail map
mapsize: 4096x4096

1 color map (BTW: I love it now to make colormaps in ZBrush, too!)
mapsize: 2048x2048
(that’s all…this time I decided not to add other maps)

animation and rendering created in messiah:Studio!
renderingtimes: around 4min per frame
special new feature: TextureDeform for muscle&tendon displacement

A little collection of different frames…still just 340 polygon cage!

Although the animation doesn’t show the little mouth morph, I couldn’t resist to try it out and thought it’s too interesting not to show it. I will see that I make a little lip-sync animation with him to check out just how far it can go on this minimal level. Each of the above frames took around 11 minutes.

Now as for the eye-support-map, not only that you can use ZBrush to make morph-targets for the low-poly-cage, but you can as well make displacement maps to blend to for the animation/rendering package. I used expressions in messiah to tie certain movements to the blending of two displacement maps. In this case the eyes. As the eye was squinting real hard it would have collapsed the original map, since even the eyelids are PURE displacement on this one. So in order to keep going harder with the squinting a second map with even extra wrinkles would just blend over…here’s the example:

I was not sure if such a dramatic change would really blend smoothly enough, but turned out really well…

Of course just after having made the extra eye map I felt like it deserved more details. Yet, I was too lazy to add the details to both maps and realized it was perfectly viable to simply make a seperate Detail map. Not really a necessary thing to do, but it was great to find out for sure that it doesn’t cause any troubles to do such a thing, in fact, it almost felt beneficial. To have super details on another map allows for a lot more freedome in alterting the more coarse map. As I am planning to go a bit further with this experiment soon it will be a breeze to just accentuate, add and remove wrinkles for more animation.

I’m not sure if I don’t overload this message, if I mention all of the crazy revelations this little project has brought, but I’ll just mention one more thing I found particularely amazing. The EAR! It practically consists out of 3 polygons. They are simply bend in such a way that it covers most significant directions in which the displacement would have needed to go to extrude an ear. It’s not perfect, but it’s been stunningly close to it.

I really don’t want to impose my kind of answers on anyone, but I’d actually love to reply to any of your questions. I’m sure there are by now so many things I’m taking for granted, that I most likely fail to mention everything that makes all of the above really interesting. So, please, don’t hesitate!

I will also continue to post some more stuff on it on my website that would just look silly in one post here…hehe…so feel free to come and see:
http://www.taron.de

Attachments

[Thomas_Helzle]

Holy Cow.
This is very beautiful!

Can you share some of your shading secrets? That skin looks perfect. How does your messiah shaderflow look and what are the most critical settings for such natural skin?

And how do you lay out your UV maps to work the best?

Fantastic work. Yehaw

Cheers,

Thomas Helzle

[Frenchy_Pilou]

… beautiful but more impressive!
Cool animation, this poor guy want to catch a fly ?
Cool try
Pilou

[3DP]

Beautiful work. Are the neck deformations a result of morphing between disp.maps as well?

[Taron]

Hey, thanx, already!
Let’s see…skin shading. Now that’s a messiah question, but well, the new basicshader has a vastly improved translucency section that allows besides real SSS (which I havn’t used on this one) a very neat access to subdermal coloring and carefully crafted blending principles. This pretty much spits out the look you are looking at. Just so you know, none of the stills have any color correction on them, just composited together and a little gradient in the background, but the skin is genuinely pure render…no touchups whatsoever! Right out of the box…ok…I think I kind said that now…hehe…but I’m actually proud of it, too…I almost forgot that that was possible after all these production years. Although I really don’t want to go too deeply on that part right here, with what this basicShader allows to do, I can finally do nearly everything I wanted to in the past, including the translation of some curious observations I made about skin or any mildly oily substance. Radiosity is now a tool you can tailor around your ideas and not just a button of hope!

The uv-map was done in Lightwave and looks like this:

This is kind of like a manually generated cylindrical map. Picking a seam in the back and unwelding it, so that it can literally be unwrapped completely. Although it is by hand, I now do this sort of thing for a single uv map in less than 5 minutes, maybe 10 in bad cases or goofing around cases.

As for the Neck-deformations, that’s again a bit of a messiah topic there, but it’s half messiah half ZBrush as well. The brand new “TextureDeform” shader allows to map images through bones for example, which can be used as muscles. Those then effect the displacement and not the geometry. As a result you can get highly detailed deformations nearly independent from your polygoncage. I generated “2d” maps in Zbrush, using the advantage of visualizing 16bit images when you paint heights on the document itself and export it as a TIF. Although in this case it was highly experimental and therefore almost too simple to show, just simulating a few tendons all at once, but this very image is mapped into the geometry about 14 times along several ‘muslce-bones’ including the jaw, which really made it feel like bone is moving underneath skin, if you really pay attention to the jawline.
There are actually two maps, because the adams-apple is actually mapped the same way thanx to my friend Chris Reid’s reminding me of the anatomy.
However, the tendon map looks like this in ZBrush:

…the adam’s apple looks like this:

Setting up these things is actually just fun…especially the moment you have it, you can go into ZBrush and paint whatever crazy map you like, reload in messiah and it kinda blows your mind for moment…I’m still a little flubbergusted by this very strange powersurge. Feels like the dawn of a new age to me. As far as I’m concerned, I’m dealing with a Dreamteam with ZBrush and messiah. But then, don’t take it from me…I’m biased…really!

[angelo]

Wow…wow…wow

[Nemoid]

woot !
fantastic test

your description about disp textures linked to bone rotation ( am i assuming right? ) reminds me of a quick test an italian Lw user friend of mine showed me with simple maps to simmulate something like a spine on a character’s back bulging as the object bended. (he showed me with a cilinder, but i imagine and see from your test how this is actually powerful for final details in movement)

happy to hear about the messiah skin shader too. works so good in your images.

Are there particular things u did in Z Brush, about detailing u wish to show us ? maybe some detailing tricks u used?

Too great you did the ear with 3 poligons and a map.

[Taron]

That is the hard part for me to describe, actually, because I feel like I’ve just learned about these tools and almost assume you all know them already, but again, risking to say things you’ve heard already I’ll give you the steps and brushes I was using during the process:

At level 5 (division):
standart brush to quickly fuzz in the major shapes, add some wrinkles by squeezing the focus of the brush to about 95 and then pinch quickly along the wrinkle to overcome the low resolution of the mesh at that level and get some decent details already then.

At level 6:
increasing the amount of detail by some more standart brush work and pinching and nudging. (after making some folds and wrinkles the nudging can be used to make them hang a bit, simulating the weight of skin a little bit. Works very well around the outside of the eyes)
At this level I also start using the glorious stencils! Very powerful tool to get vast amounts of details in single brush strokes! I found some silly skin patterns on the web, one of which was called dino skin and was really REALLY cheesy, but somehow it appeared quite perfect for some simple skin rubbs! Once you imported the alpha, gave it a bit of radial falloff (Rf), you just need to say make stencil (Make St) and shwoops, off the alpha goes into a stencil. In stencil I change the settings to display elevation only (Elv), switch on Wrap mode and switch off Show! That way only when you hit space you see the stencil and can move it around and rotate and stretch it, but once you release space again it is invisible and you can start rubbing through. (I like using the standart brush for that, too). To get fine wrinkles around the eye for instance I simply stretch the stencil a lot along H and then rotate it piece by piece around the eye before rubbing through. It goes extremely quick and gives stunning details instantly. Then, depending on the skin region, I would switch between Zsub and Zadd to have pores either go in or come out. For some special regions I would create a quick alpha myself, leaving the tool and clearing the document to make a new alpha with the whole set of brushes, grab it and make it a stencil again. bring back the original tool (object) and continue stenciling about with that. The projection master is a fantastic tool, when it comes to very controlled details. I would add specifically pronounced wrinkles there quickly, using the decor brush and bump and blur as Bay Raitt was showing it to me…fantastic moves. But I must say I’m not so virtuos with that combination yet…bump is a tricky one to use if you don’t want to bump your geometry out too much…but the results over small wrinkles is quite stunning. I’ve learned a whole lot in that one special encounter at the ZBrush user meeting of him and Meats Meier. And I believe Meats just released his big Gnomon ZBrush tutorial DVD…wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the one stop tutorial for getting into it and deeper. Anyway…

before computing the displacement map, I go just one more level up in the divisions to smooth out the results. This allows to obtain a very accurate displacement map at a really decently smooth level of subdivision. Occasionally I would then use the stencils a bit more to get some super fine detail…but on this one I didn’t even go there.

The most special thing on the Neckling is, that I did this seperate detail map. As weird as this may sound to some (including myself), it really offers a different type of ease. Sometimes when you work on rougher displacements it is great to use the smooth brush (I use it very very often, too). If I had high details on it, it would blur them away. Instead I can continue to modify the coarse structure of the shape without having to worry about effecting the details. When I create "morph"maps then, I’m totally free to go crazy on any place without fear. Nice and relaxing.

I hope that was a bit of an insight, even if many may have heard those things already. I know some don’t know about stencils, if you don’t, make them known to you. It’s a two step process that saves you potentially DAYS of work and folds them into minutes or even seconds. I’ll see to it, that I come up with a way to show that off a lot more then with just words!

Thanx, again!!!

[sirquadalot]

WOW! You have given me a good deal to think about! Very cool!

[julez4001]

Hey Taron
Can you show your messiah shaderflow?
Love to see how that skin coloring works.

[Nemoid]

wow Taron, thank you for the very exhaustive explaination.

I really have to discover the power of stencils

looking forward to your next posts.

[Jason_Belec]

Nice work Taron. Keeping it simple is always the best, great results.

[AdamT]

Very cool! I’ve attempted a similar workflow in Cinema 4D (though with less skill I’m afraid). Basically what I did was use set-driven keys–driving the opacity of different maps in the displacement channel (overlay mode) with pose sliders. This works very well to an extent, but when you have multiple poses mixed together it tends to blend out the detail of the maps. There may be a workaround using split displacment maps (high and low accomplished with clipping) and using different mix modes.

[Giantsun]

What a great model.
What a magnific model.
What a wonderful model.

That doesnt cover it…but hey I tried.

[frogspasm]

Too freaking cool Taron
Now I wish I had dug into stencils earlier.
Very inspiring seeing someone like you gettting excited over new techniques.

~Mike D.

[Stephen_Green]

Very nice, Taron - I did have an idea a while back of creating normal maps for faked cloth animation - basically you would simulate or sculpt the hires mesh and then drive that based on the position of the bones … Just waiting for consoles to have enough memory to spare for that

• Steve

[3DP]

Thanks for the explanations taron. Very informative.

[heynewt]

Yes, Taron, more on stencils in Zbrush please. Though there’s a lot of great info in the Zbrush forum, I’ve searched far and wide to find more info on stencils and their use. That’s not covered so well in the tutorials.

Robert

[Kircho]

Hello Taron,

First let me congratulate you on a nice clean shave:)(http://www.cgnetworks.com/stories/2004_10/pug_meeting/taron_alvarez_bay.jpg)
I don’t think its nessesary to mention again the caliber of your models and detailing.But I will say that I like how you modelled the lower half of the face ,resembles your own I think ?

I find most interesting in your " experimental report" the extraction of dispalcment maps with different detail levels. Even though you’ve now mentioned the method twice in this thread I’m still unsure as to the exact workflow. Here is what I geather >

Create Model and stop before high detail level >> Extract Disp Maps ( low detail)
Detail Model and extract High detail map >> For every morph extract more high detail disp maps…?

Also if you’ll allow me two quick question concerning Messiah…Did you map the adams apple + tendone details to a bone then blend it ontop of the other disp map controlling the neck?
In concern to the eye I guess you did’nt use a local disp map like with the a-apple, but another whole different map? I wondered if you can have more then two disp maps , covering the whole face, acting simultaneiously?

As for Detailing , there are two brushes which I don’t think are too well known for there texturing capabilities. The first is the directional(also look at depth burh,its different in that its effected by underlieing volume…add deco brush to the list also) brush, with its obvious benefits in defining wrinkles and flow of skin on a character extremely easily and controllably. Because of the way it functions inside of Texture Master you can layer it by gradually increasing the z-depth on the brush.
The other brush is the Glow brush. What is basically does is seperate the Blur brush into two components. When ADD is anabled the brush will smooth between tight corners inbetween topology ‘islands’. When SUB its function is just the opposite effecting larger open spaces and maintaing vallies and nooks.
Also two minor tips from old…you can record brush strokes so if you have similar models or you simply want to add generic layers of detail to a character you can record the a single stroke or stroke session and then use it over and over again on any model.The part that makes it even more interesting is that you can modify the characterisitcs of the brush and the stroke will use them. You can also do something similar with zscipts.
The second tip is that you can always use the transform Gizmo to transform the orientation and position of the strokes knowing that they will always conform to the pre-existing volumes,after moving it.

Since they are no too often mentioned even in past thread/tuts I hope you can take something new from them Taron.

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Thanks kindley for taking the time to share with us your results and excitment:)

Cheers

Kircho

[SolidSnakexxx]

this is way cool I really like how it is…very neat

Yong