Displacement

So what have I been up to? Well, trying to rig some characters but the models I created were too dense and in order to connect them to the rig and when it came time to animate it would take hours to get the simplest moves. But all that density is where the details are, what to do? displacement maps are something that work very well on paper but i haven't had much luck with them. the idea is that you sculpt very fine detail in a model and export that detail in a map where black and white, with shades of grey in between represent values of height. What it allows you to do is use a much lower density (resolution) model an still get detail. so back to the atelier I went to figure out how to get them to render correctly. with the help of a few web based tutorials and the Zbrush forum I got it to work. i also took the time to paint the models. Below are two shots, one is a screen capture of a character with actual resolution and the other a render with displacement map. okay, on to skinning and then finally animation.