texturing character for animation
 

I have a character in maya that I will be animating. I am working on the skin texture and debating if I should go with normal maps or displacement maps for the pores of the skin.

Is it true normals maps are more animater friendly so i am hoping to stick with normals? however I am having a hard time bringing out the pore detail with normal maps. Is that type of detail only possible with displacement maps?

i am sculpting the pore texture in zbrush and bringing it into maya. I know that with displacements you need to set up the approximation editor and with bumps i have turned quadratic filter to off.
I am not sure what else I can do to get the normal maps to display nicely in maya.

any help would be great.

If you have only done wrinkles and porse in zbrush you could try a bump map...........dave

Normal maps are pretty simple form Z, do a google about it.

As for animator friendly, not too sure what you mean about that. A normal can be shown in the viewport but I dont really se how that is much of an advantage unless it warps, but that is more of a modeling and blend shape issue as you may need multiple normals/dispa to compensate for the deformation driven off the blends

something I sometimes forget to do when using normal maps made in zbrush, is to make sure I set the bump node to use as 'tangent space normals' rather than bump. Make sure you have created the normal map with the right settings. And I have been making use of a tip I read which i have found helpful which is to create a cavity map in zbrush and mulitply it over the colour map, to give the normal map a bit of a helping hand like.