Is it possible to rig a detailed sculpt for posing? I’ve rigged one mesh but believe I had to delete all higher sub levels.
I just tried it and was able to bind to a mesh with 5 sbudiv levels, and pose it. I don’t really know how to use the rigging tools though, so I wasn’t able to figure out how to change subdiv levels after I bound it, or even how to use the posed figure in any way. Also, transforming the rig at subdiv 5 was hideously slow, so it wasn’t all that much fun.
One thought might be to try rigging the mesh generated by transpose master, and using that somehow to pose a fully detailed and subtooled figure.
The way I was taught was to take a lower res mesh and then put a normal map on it to make it look higher res than it is. Maybe you want to try this, as it takes a whole lot less memory to accomplish.
Shadowcat, are there any tutorials you could point me too explaining this process?
I will do you one better and explain it:
Once you’ve polypainted, drop down to your lowest subD level. Once that is completed, go to the section marked UVs in the Tool Palette. Depending on your model’s resolution, (HD res is 2048 and higher, for example) select how big you want your map to be-the general rule is, the higher the amount of UV points/polys, the bigger the map must be (as an aside BE CAREFUL in how many points you’ve got: more points=more memory!!). Once that is fixed, look down: you will see a section that has a choice of AUV tiles, PUV tiles, and GUV tiles. For intensive purposes, we are using AUV tiles, so select it.
Go down to the section called Normals in the Tools Palette. Check off Adaptive Scan mode (this creates accuracy.) Ask it to create a normal map (it derives its UV’s from the UV palette selections you made earlier.) Once it does, go to the part that says Clone Normal Map. Click. You will notice that the map is now in the texture palette on the left. Go above to the texture palette at the top. There will be a button that says Flip V. Click it. Export the normal map and SAVE IT AS A TIF FILE.
Now, for the texture. Go to the texture section in the Tools palette. Create a texture from polypaint-it should look like it is tiled. Flip V and export it like you did the normal map. NEVER FORGET TO FLIP BEFORE YOU EXPORT!!
Export the LOWEST RES version of the model in .obj format (you never did mention if you are using Maya or Max or whatever, so this is a format that most apps accept.) Load the .obj file into the third party application. Plug in the texture and normal maps as you would normally, but do not forget in the latter case to specify that you want Tangent Space normals.
The result shall be a low res poly that looks high res because of the map you apply.
I’m sorry shadowcat, I meant rigging with zspheres to be able to pose the statue, all in zbrush. Real sorry man, I should have explained that better in my initial reply 
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