texturing character for animation

# 1 10-12-2009 , 06:32 AM

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Join Date: Oct 2008

Posts: 56

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.

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# 2 10-12-2009 , 10:11 AM

The thin red line
Join Date: Aug 2009

Location: England

Posts: 4,472

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

Last edited by daverave; 10-12-2009 at 01:22 PM.

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# 3 10-12-2009 , 06:09 PM

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Join Date: May 2005

Location: Manchester Uk

Posts: 6,300

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

"No pressure, no diamonds" Thomas Carlyle

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# 4 10-12-2009 , 11:32 PM

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Join Date: Jul 2008

Location: Chelmsford, Essex, UK

Posts: 1,162

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.

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texturing character for animation

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