Damon Lavenski Walks Through Steps to Work With Sculpted Blend Shapes from Zbrush to Maya.

A lot of effort has pushed Maya’s Blend Shape workflow and sculpting tools towards new heights for character artists and riggers. Still, if you like to use other sculpting tools within your pipeline, that process is still reasonably simple. For instance, if you wanted to use Zbrush to create sculpted blend shapes to use with an existing Maya rig.

Damon Lavenski, a CG Generalist, working for Psyop posts a new tutorial that looks into using Zbrush for sculpting blend shape geometry and how to apply them to Maya. The tutorial covers working with the new Shapes Editor in Maya to add the pieces to a character rig. The 20-minute tutorial is jam-packed full of helpful hints and tips.

Changing Directions

Maya and Zbrush workflow also operates in the other direction too. You can rig and pose a character in Autodesk Maya and then add more sculpted details to that pose with Zbrush. Freelance 3D Artist JL Mussi presented that technique, which you can check out here.