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Displacement maps from ZBrush, Shave and a Haircut Plugin

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi everyone,

I’m using the Shave and a Haircut plugin but I came across a problem figuring out a workflow for my student short animation project.

I spent countless amount of hours trying to figure out the solution to the following problem:

I am trying to grow fur from a character that has a displacement map attached to it. I am using sub-div approximation to divide the mesh at
render time to get the details of the displacement map, and using the
same displacement map in the displacement attribute of Shave and a
haircut.

My problem however is that the hair does not grow from the subdivided
mesh but from the original geometry, creating a gap between the skin
and the fur. Because the displacement map is plugged into displacement
I can not offset the fur.

I was wondering if somebody come across this before and if there is a solution to this problem without smoothing the actual models as
they are already rigged and skinned.

Thank you so much

#2

I would just make a copy of the areas areas that will grow hair. Subdivide them a couple times and apply your displacement map to them, real-time displacement, not render time. Then collapse your stack or delete your history or whatever and you should end up with medium-high res geometry shells that you can make invisible and have hair grow from. They should match pretty closely to your render time subdivided main mesh.