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multiple rigs and characters in one scene

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello

Is there a possible workflow if you want to rig a number of characters and then position/rotate/pose them in a scene? I haven’t been able to solve this one myself yet - and I couldn’t find any tutorial on the matter. More specifically I’m thinking about scenes where many characters need to interact, like dancing or fighting, and where you need to have all characters visible and being able to switch easily between them in order to pose the rigs/characters easily.

I’m not thinking about characters consisting of a number of subtools each - I’m rather thinking polygrouped characters: for instance character A, B, C - as one subtool each.

Thanks

Thomas

#2

if you check in the projects folder when you load lightbox theres some examples of rigging scenes using mannequins including an awesome little stick figurish bar brawl :slight_smile: .

as far as the how. you would have to do it the same way you do everything else in zbrush… subtools…zspheres… for each. have all your players. have each one set up with a zsphere rig… pose away

only problem then will be how much your computer can handle before meltdown.

#3

Thanks - But my understanding of mannequins is that they have nothing to do with rigging high density meshes, unless you rebuild them into proper zspheres rigs, right?

A major obstacle in using a zsphere rig to position a character and to modify it’s pose in a larger scene, is that it doesn’t seem possible to rotate the entire character properly, at least not in the Y-axis. Any attempt at rotating the root sphere will yield only a local transformation - not rotating the entire character as one would prefer. The only option that seems to work is to rotate the entire rig using deformations. Got it to work in x and z axis. But doing it in the Y-axis will seriously distort of the entire character mesh.

No solution to this??

#4

Silence - so no solution to this apparently. Am I really the only one who saw the need for this functionality? I would think it a very natural thing to have in an otherwize brilliant program. Hopefully this will be adressed in the future.