Excellent work! Expressions are spot on! Well done!
Hi Jelmer!
We nearly worked together on Coke Avatar, but maybe next time eh? Amazing work and brilliant reference, thanks for that!
Dave @ NEXUS LONDON
i love those expressions dude!!
Awesome work!
excellent!awsome man ,the rend is great and I want to see your blend animation if you finished one 
if you do that so that’s more exciting hahahahah!
Awesome Work !!
nice expression work man, love them!
I like every your work 
small_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamond
Thanks again everyone!!
alexleia: Thanks man, hope all is well on your end.
konjo kothar vignar: Glad to hear that. Have fun!
broadstroke: For a model to work well in animation, you’ll still need a strong polymodeled mesh. For making still images, like these, I am sure there’s a hundred other ways and techniques to get to the same result. Within a production however, getting the polymodel done properly first, allows it to be handed of to riggers and setup-artists while the texture artist can start detailing it through bump and displacement. I don’t allow myself to get rusty with polymodeling, since it’s still the key skill you need to have, when beeing hired as a modeler.
fleety: I remember! Nice job on the troll in that commercial!
Hey JBoskma 
Really cool expressions on this guy. The modelling and sculpting is very nicely done too. You’ve come a long way! Why no polycount loving anymore?
Isn’t this a really old concept though? I thought I saw that drawing years and years ago…
BTW, you’d be able to animate it in the same way even if you had sculpted all the facial expressions in ZBrush. You’d just treat your lowest sub-division level as the “base mesh”, export a “neutral” one to start with, then just export different OBJs for each sculpted facial expression and hook them up to a blendShape in Maya, exactly the same as if you’d modelled the expressions in Maya.
After all, it’s just mesh data, and personally for large-scale expressive stuff I find it easier to pull things around and tweak polys in ZBrush rather than messing around with verts/edges/faces in Maya.
Unless by this, you meant you actually rigged it all up and then “animated” the face in Maya rather than just tweaking each mesh manually (which is what I figured you meant).
Whatever gets the job done, I guess
MoP: That’s why I asked Jelmer about his workflow in a previous post. I too find it easier to work within Zbrush, and export obj files to Maya. I find the technical side of things very boring, so I want to make sure my methods are good for production too. I’m quite excited about GoZ and Decimation Master.
Mop: Hey man, been a while! Ofcouse I have finetuned the expressions a bit by moving and exaturating the forms in Zbrush slightly. However doing the expressions just in Zbrush wouldn’t work when looking at it from a production point of view. This is based on my personal experiences in post production.
If Tom would be a production model, you want to do most your blendshape deformation within Maya.
Reason #01: Only what is seen within Maya can be controled and timed by the animators. It’s common misunderstood that for hero resolution film models much of the deformation can happen within the displacement maps, this isn’t true. The displacement is just along for the ride.
Reason #02: That beeing said, you want to be sure that when your deforming the face, you deform the right polygons. Everytime the nasolabial folds deform, be it for a smile, a snarl or a stretch, you want to make sure it’s actually the polygons that make that fold are the ones that deform. Otherwise the effect will be plain weird when blending between shapes.
In Zbrush it’s very easy to alter form, but not nescecarly the right polygons are affected by this. Realistic deformation and control at this point can only happen in a polygon mesh. Blending in displacements gives a completely different effect, then actual polygons roling, stretching, collapsing and pushing into eachother.
Reason #03: A slightly more practical reason for me to do the main chunck of deforming in Maya, is the actual selectability of the faces. Although much can be achieved with clever masking in Zbrush, unfolding, stretching and roling the corners of the mouth and other areas that are hard to reach or see on the surface are a pain to do without the ability to manually select verts or faces.
I hope this all makes sense, let me know if you’ve got any questions. I personally was slightly disapointed when experiencing how much of the work still needs to be done within the polygon environment in order to function properly and efficiently. If your intent is to make images, Zbrush will blow all your other options out of the water. If your goal is to create functional models, you won’t be able to get away with it just yet, at this point.
Yep, that all makes sense - thanks for the explanations
Holy crap, what a great work!!
It all makes sense to me but I do have one small question.
“Ofcouse I have finetuned the expressions a bit by moving and exaturating the forms in Zbrush slightly.”
How were you able to fine tune the expressions in zbrush? What I mean is how were you able to edit the deformed mesh? Obviously you cannot project the higher detail on the deformed mesh because it would try to project your base head.
To clarify what I am asking (cuz it sounds weird even to me) is if you are not using zbrush for the facial expressions how did you use it to fine tune them? Did you import the geometry at the lowest subdivision level and replace your base head shape with the deformed one, and all the higher subdivisions are kept?
Thanks for all the information 
That’s exactly what I did. Then refined the model slightly, and if changes occured at the lowest level in ZB after that, I exported that as the new blendshape.
Thanks for the response, very good to know. I have been wanting to attempt some facial character animation, but I was not sure how it would work with keeping certain details.
You rock Jelmer!
I wholeheartedly agree, and would like to add some more reasons:
Realistic creature deformation is all about recreating the movement of skin which we percieve through high frequency detail like pores, moles, freckles etc. If you just smooth skin a character, it’ll never be realistic as instead of skin and muscle and bone, it’ll look like rubber, stretching around the joints.
Skin is sliding all around over the underlying structures, and prefers to wrinkle up instead of compressing.
The troubles with Zbrush are that, as Jelmer mentioned, you don’t have proper access to individual vertices to finetune the falloff of the deformations. For example you’d want to move the skin as far as the back of the jaw bone for something as simple as a puckered lips blendshape (don’t just accept it, look into a mirror to see it) and it’s very complicated to do this in Zbrush. There aren’t enough tools to relax and even out the amount of deformations either, or test how multiple shapes work when mixed together.
Also, there’s no proper way to test your deformations in motion, in real time, like when you’re pulling the blendshape sliders in Maya.
Which is probably why all the blendshape work I’ve seen that was primarily created in Zbrush looks like rubber faces…
Very nice work on the expressions by the way!
Or it could be the artists doing the blendshape work. Never blame/claim tools for the quality of a work, that’s what I say. 
That said, I can understand why you use Maya for the majority of animation, for added controls.
Can’t expect someone to paint blind and procude stuff as good as he could do when he can see.
Zbrush is just not fit for this kind of work at the quality levels we expect. It’s not the end of the world.