ZBrushCentral

Record Deformation Animation

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I just discovered the Record deformation Animation Button inside the Layers Menu.
In theory its a fantastic feature for my purpose but it records too many substeps resulting in very large mdd files. Since i want to use the animation inside of 3D max I also need to convert it to something like alembic which again triples the file size.

Doing around 10 brush strokes on a 500K points test model i ended with a 3GB alembic scene.

For the animation i am planning to do i want to record hundreds of brush strokes on a 8M points model. Extrapolating the data above i estimate that to be a 2,5 TB file -.-

Is there a way to make a deformation keyframe only when a brushstroke is finished or just drastically reduce the recording framerate?

edit: i found out there is an addon for blender which converts mdd to pc2. at least that bit is taken care of :wink:

#2

Not directly with that feature as far as I’m aware. The more points on the mesh, the more this will increase file size. The MDD data can be imported to the TImeline, and the Movie palette may have additional options when recording your animation.