Hi,

Using GoZ, I have hand-sculpted some hi-res facial details, including wrinkles on a custom V4 figure for a big smile facial expression.  Since virtually all of the fine detail is lost when porting the morph back into Poser, I figured a displacement map would do the trick but that's where my current skill level hit its limit.

I know it is possible to switch between two maps using a blender node as a dependent parameter of a joint, morph, master dial, etc.  Where I get lost is how to properly prepare a displacement map baked from a high-res ZBrush sculpt of V4 with a fully posed facial expression for a compatible UV template that -- I assume -- is a different alignment/layout since it's a zeroed face.  Hopefully that's an accurate description... XD

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

This would all be within ZBrush I would think. The easiest way I could think of something like this working for you would be to have worked with layers.  You would create the smile morph on one layer then on another layer you would create the wrinkles caused by the smile. Then turn off the smile layer before extracting your maps. This is pure theory, as I have not tested the idea at all. Worth a try?

Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a shot and report back :)

Ok. Although now that I think about it, I don't think the smile is baked into the displacement map. I could be wrong there. If I'm right though, then you should just  be fine generating the map as is.  Will have to try this out myself one weekend. You could probably even just paint out the mouth with a 50% grey, keeping only the wrinkles.

So far so good.  One thing I should have clarified -- the smile is already an existing morph on the figure -- but so far the steps I've taken seem to be the way to go:

I exported the smiling head as an object (posed) into ZBrush with GoZ.  Then in ZBrush I created a new layer, set it to "1" and turned on record mode.  Then back in Poser I zeroed the face and exported as an object into ZBrush with GoZ (note: I haven't yet completed the round trip, so this makes 2 exports to ZBrush without re-importing to Poser).  

Since I had record mode on, the zero-ed head immediately replaced the smiling head as a new layer and voila, I have a smile morph slider in Zbrush.  Now I'll sculpt the wrinkles, etc. as a second layer, dial down the smile, export a new displacement map that should fit! 

Fingers crossed. :)

Cool! Good luck and post a pic or two if you feel up for it. :)

I'm also interested in seeing these results. 

~Shane

The basic issue stems from the fact that my figure's head is extremely customized with several 3rd party and custom hand-sculpted morphs.  Not to mention she's scaled down to be 5'7".  

Initially I ran into issues with her UV maps.  I'm only just learning mapping/texturing in-depth so bear with me.  I setup the GoZ session as described above - I had my zeroed face and my big smile as two layers.  I subdivided a few times and  on a new layer I sculpted in all the crow's feet and other wrinkles caused by the smile.  

I ran into issues creating displacement maps, after reading/watching some tutorials I finally got them to work.  The only issue was they were getting layed out at an odd angle, rotated about 60 degress clockwise.  So I then tried to manually fix that in photoshop, only to find that when properly rotated the map didn't align with the head material used on the figure.  So I even tried to manually correct that with warping in Photoshop.  I got it lined up and added it to my shader.  After lots of futzing with the displacement value it started looking so-so, but not without a ton of little artifacts and odd bloating.  

At that point I found this runtimedna thread about this very topic.  I immediately noticed their maps looked a lot different than mine.  Not only were they perfectly aligned, they only had the newly sculpted detail.  Mine had info for every existing crevice on her face...  

I followed their steps with a standard V4.2 figure and voila, I got the same results as they did.  I've stripped down my figure to the bare essentials, regrouped her UVs in UV mapper, etc. etc.  While it eased the import process to and from ZBrush, I still get the same overcooked displacement maps.  I've attached both the good v4.2 and my custom map.

Any ideas? (and thanks for reading ;).

Oh it looks like the V4.2 portion of that image is upside down... fyi. 

I didn't know blender nodes can be controlled by parameters. That sounds cool.