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animation skins

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I know I won’t have the correct ‘terminology’, so please bear with me.

I have read that you can export your work from zbrush to an animation program, and if you have a model built, say in max, you can sort of apply your work from zbrush onto the model you built in max, so that you have a very detailed skin on a simple model that you can then animate.

I hope I didn’t butcher that too much.

So here’s the question. Can you have the skin animated also? For example, say I have created a dinosaur in zbrush. I then export it and put it on a dinosaur model I made in max, and then send it to maya to animate. When the dinosaur takes a step, can the skin of the dinosaur shake up and down separate of the model (kind of like flabby skin I suppose)?

Or if I made a cowboy using the same process, can I have the wrinkles in his jeans move as he walks? Or would I need to create ‘new’ wrinkles in zpaint for every frame (say 30 of them per second) and then export it out that way? Hopefully I wouldn’t have to do that, as I would have to zpaint every single frame!

Sorry if this is a stupid question. I am below noob level. I was just wondering how an expert with years of specialized training would do this, much like cgi in movies, if he/she were using zpaint.

Thanks for your time!

#2

This ultimately has nothing to do with ZBrush and everything to do with the capabilities of the animation package that you’re using. Getting a surface to move realistically over top of an underlying structure is something that the CG industry has been working on for a long time. Some packages even go so far as to use muscle bones when rigging the mesh.

One thing that you can use ZBrush for is to create different displacement maps for the poses of your models. For example, you might have one map that you use when an arm is extended and another for when the arm is bent. Then you’d blend between the maps as the arm flexes. By doing this you can create the illusion that there are muscles under the skin, and you can also sculpt natural wrinkles or folds that appear at one position but disappear at the other.

#3

Thank you!