Zbrushed with skeleton?

[Brighton]

I have just finished my first project which included the use of Zbrush to detail a character.

This character was a Spanish Conquistador, complete with chest plate, belts, clothing and belts...

I ran into HEAPS of problems positioning him into the pose I wanted, as it stretched all of the displacement maps that I had made in Zbrush.

SO, the question I am asking is, how do people keep a nicely detailed model (Zbrushed up) in proportion even though they are playing around with the rigged up model, and moving it from the stance it was in in Zbrush...

I was thinking next time I would just pose it first in Maya how I wanted, then bring it into Zbrush, but that sort of limits you to purely still images, without the freedom of changing up the position.

Any ideas class?
There are a couple of techniques you can do. firstly though, I am going to ignore the problem of displacement maps. Maya (Mental Ray) is completely annoying when it comes to tessellation and displacement maps.

So posing, In Zbrush, you create a new layer on the object. That layer will store the pose. You should be able to maintain symmetrical sculpting while that layer is off, and then simply tab it on and generate another layer for Pose specific sculpt deformation. This is if you are super specific about asymmetric skin folding and muscle bulging.

If you are not concerned about that degree of detail, and you are happy with maintaining the default pose sculpt in any position, you can sculpt a default pose in Zbrush, then pose another model with same topology and UVs in Maya, bring it over to Zbrush, and reproject the detail.

Of course, if Maya displacement mapping ever worked, you could simply apply that in Maya, and create whatever pose you want.

I am hoping Zbrush 4 has some sort of Skeleton system, separate from ZSpheres.

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