Shortly after creating the Neckling and digesting the overwhelming feedback between CGtalk and ZBrushCentral I’ve decided to relax a little bit and play around with his displacement, making a totally new map during a chat with a friend of mine. About 45 minutes later we were both floored about what came out…it’s a revolution, whether this becomes transparent to everyone who sees it, or it simply confirms what some were thinking.
Click on the image below to watch the quicktime movie
A new generation of not only character creation, but also a new era of morphing…hahaha! Although this is the most simple of all beginnings it clearly shows the stunning potential. This shows the use of a single base geometry (still just 350 polygons) with one setup and one animation that can transform into an unlimited amount of characters, from similar features to nearly entirely different features not only with bones deformed, but even with underlying geometry morphs to the heart’s content. And all of this as simple as making alternative displacement maps. The productivity of this approach is unheard of and the possibilities are nightmarishly vast. But just the simplicity of how to achieve all of this by using ZBrush and messiah:Studio is what makes this as brilliant as it sounds.
After having doodled the new displacement map of the greenone, oh, and also painting the color map in ZBrush (I really really love doing this there, too, now…man!) I just went into messiah and exchanged the maps at first…(took about 20 sec including a few giggles of anticipation) I just hit render and forgot that I left it on a high resolution with GI…but hey…just out of curosity let it run for a minute…it was instantly as good as perfect. I didn’t like the same specularity, so I adjusted that and a little bit the translucency and ready it was.
The Changed Neckling (quicktime)
So then I figured, why not use the Shadernode called “WeightSpot” and alpha in the new maps over the old maps, animated the alphas real quick and that’s been it. Ready for remderomg and it altogether, including a tiny animation change (little jiggle when he begins transforming) took barely 2 hours! The render of the final morph animation as you see it up at the top took a bit less than 4 hours, including the render of the little background I made in ZBrush real quick and rendered in messiah as well.
[b]
Here’s a little clip that shows the animated metaEffectors for the blending
[/b]Here’s a look at the Shaderflow, featuring the WeightSpot node that makes this kind of animation so simple. It feeds it’s values into the opacity of the alternative textureMaps that then simply blend over top of the original textureMaps.
I will continue to build far more experiments and therefore examples of this kind to see just how far we can go with all of this. Considering that I really hardly scratched the surface of what this concept has in stock for us. In combination with the TextureDeform that continues to work underneath these wicked displacement changes the possibility to make believable transformations besides simply creating a new principle for building complex sets of preset characters with full setups will be without end. Who knows, maybe I will even create a library for messiah:Studio users! 
Again, if you feel like I have left out something you want to know, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ve also got a post on ZBrushCentral that goes just a bit more into the ZBrush involvement, which continues to be father to this new world, while we in my eyes turn out to be somewhat of a mother…impregnated by th…nope, I don’t go there!
;).
slurp Wow.