ZBrushCentral

Question: Loading blend shapes as layers in ZBrush

ZScripting Help
#1

Hi,

First post on the forum, I’m really glad to see such a community for ZBrush artists and I hope I’ll find the help I need here :smiley:
I am a character Rigger and the modelers I work with all sculpt in ZBrush. They are also doing the blend shapes in ZBrush.

They usually have the head mesh and create layers for each shape we need.
We are trying to smooth the workflow between rigging and modeling and I’d like to write a small tool for them to easily import/export blend shapes as layers.

Basically I have the blend shapes described in a file as delta from the original point position. I would like to load this file as a layer for each blend shape in ZBrush and also being able to export each layers as a delta vector from the original mesh.

I can do programming in other 3D package, mainly in Python, but I’m not familiar with ZScripting or the ZBrush API.
Do you think this is something possible to automate in ZBrush ? If so, any clue where I should start looking ?

Thanks a lot for your help,

Jeremie

#2

Hi,

Welcome to ZBC!

You can do what you want but you will need to convert your data to OBJ or some other suitable format for importing into ZBrush, you can’t manipulate mesh data directly. Likewise for the export you will need to write a converter so that you can take a format exported by ZBrush and convert it. Although writing a converter in zscript would be possible it is likely that it would be more efficient to write a DLL in C++ and call that from zscript.

There’s information about zscript here: http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/customizing-zbrush/zscripting/