ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

■ ZMovie 271

Introducing the Timeline

It is often invaluable to be able to illustrate if and how a character will move based on its
physiology, costume, or pose. ZBrush has a powerful and unique means of adding motion
to your models called the timeline. Although the timeline is not exclusively an animation
tool, it can be used to create interesting effects, changing your character’s pose and position
over time.
In this section you will learn how to create an animation that moves around a charac-
ter who changes his pose. The following tutorial demonstrates a powerful way to showcase
your work directly in ZBrush for online portfolios, client review, or your demo reel. These
tools are also powerful as proof of concept for a design pipeline. For this demonstration we
will look at some of the basic functions of the timeline.

Setting Keyframes

To get started, load the demo head.ztl from the Lightbox ZTools section.

1. To access the timeline, dock the Movie palette to the side of the screen. Open the
   Timeline menu and click Show (Figure 8.7).
   Figure 8.7
   Showing the
   timeline


2. Open the Timeline Tracks menu and make sure the Edit and Camera buttons are
   on. Edit means we can change the timeline, and Camera means that any changes we
   make to the camera will be recorded as keyframes. Position the head on one side of
   the screen and zoom out. We will create a keyframe for this position by clicking in the
   timeline (Figure 8.8). The keyframe will appear as a dot.

Figure 8.8 Click to create a keyframe in the timeline.

3. Click and drag the slider in the timeline to the
   end of the range. By default the timeline is 30
   seconds long. You can change this setting using
   the Timeline menu. Move the head a substantial
   amount and set another keyframe (Figure 8.9).
   To play back the animation, Shift-click under
   the timeline. You can stop playback at any time
   by pressing the Esc key.


4. Now we can add another keyframe in the mid-
   dle of the range. Let’s say we want the camera
   to zoom back a bit in the course of the anima-
   tion. Move the slider to the middle and zoom
   out. Click in the timeline to set a keyframe
   (Figure 8.10). Play back the animation and you
   will see this step has altered the movement of
   the head.


5. Let’s increase the speed at which the camera
   zoom out occurs. To do so, we will need to
   move the keyframe closer to the start of the ani-
   mation. Simply click-drag the keyframe dot to
   the point you want it to occur on the timeline.