Maintain perfect textures on an animated character

It might be a stupid question and i know it may be phrased completely wrong but in movies creatures always seem to have perfect textures and i know whenever I create a character, bake a map, and then animate it, the texture can turn out pretty sloppy in certain poses. Also for example when something like the hulk tenses we may see veins pop out in his arms, and then when he relaxes theyd dissapear, all in the same shot, i dont know too much about maya muscles but could someone explain how this is accomplished?
Thank you. :S

It's largely about deciding where the seems would be and hide them. When designing a character, we think ahead all the poses and movements its going to do and place texture seems accordingly. It's even easier to cover up seems nowadays with mudbox/Mari that let you paint directly on the model. And there's also Ptex.

Texture changing overtime is mostly about using blend textures. And don't forget that you can key frame all the attributes of your textures too.

A good model with a good rig won't distort textures much. Occasionally we'll do a shot-specific texture fix, but most of the time things are set up so that there won't be any texture stretching when the model moves - think about the real world, our skin doesn't really stretch much we move, it slides over the underlying tissue, and that's what a good rig emulates.

The Hulk effect is likely done with an animated or rig-driven displacement map.

thanks for the replies, helps alot, love cgsociety, and rig driven displacement maps! THIS IS SOME DAMN EXCITING STUFF!

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