ZBrushCentral

Walk cycle possible in ZB4 animation? (Answered)

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I haven’t done much with animation in ZB yet but I’ve been pondering on whether a walk cycle would be possible. Simple actions like opening and closing a mouth or raising and lowering an arm are straightforward because they simply reverse the morph. Walking requires moving from one position to another and another and another till you get back to the start position.

So is there any way to morph from one morph target to another to another? I’m guessing not but hoping I’m wrong!

#2

you can do this in z4. but it will require a “rig/morph” for each bone that should be moving. The animation happen point to point, so you need to have a lot of layers/morphs to have this happen.

you can do it with a zsphere rig though if you animate that. At least then you get FK

#3

Thanks I hadn’t considered a morph per bone! I haven’t had too much success with ZSphere rigging either. I’ll have to experiment some more, ta!

#4

Morphs/layers are unlikely to be satisfactory because the transformations will be linear. ZSphere rigged models should work just fine as rotations will be recognized as such.

#5

Cheers Marcus! In my brief playing with layers it look like the morphs were somehow storing rotational information so they didn’t behave like typical linear morphs? Maybe I’m mistaken though I only tried some quick arm bends.

#6

Small rotations may look OK but you can quickly test like this:

  1. Load up the Dog project.
  2. Create a new 3D Layer. Recording will be on by default.
  3. Go to the Deformation menu and for the Rotate slider, turn off Z axis and turn on Y.
  4. Rotate the Dog through 180 degrees.
  5. Turn off recording for the 3D Layer.

Now if you move the layer intensity slider between 0 and 1 you will see the dog rotate - but it will be flattened to almost nothing half way round! :slight_smile:

#7

LOL, yup that’s clear enough ta!