I’m glad I was thinking correctly and it is apparently related.
I’ve been mulling this all over for a couple days now.
You’re exactly right in baking displacement maps from sculpts. Not too hard to do (normal and bump maps as well).
I also understand how the displacement modifier works in Willyam Bradberry’s video. And I was thinking that you could easily set up some facial control bones for shapekeys. Then, set up different bone movements to fade the displacement in and out. For example:
Brow bone up (psoitive movement on the z-axis) = forehead scrunching.
Brow bone down (negative movement on the z-axis) or towards center of face (movement on the x-axis) or = furrowed brow
Mouth corners up (positive z-axis) = laugh lines around mouth
Mouth corners down (negative z-axis) = frown lines around mouth
Is it possible to set up two different displacement maps for the same shape key like that? So that movement in the positive fades into one map and movement in the negative fades in to another? Or, movement on the x-axis of a bone does one thing while movement on the z-axis does another. I feel like that could be set up in drivers. In the closeup video of Chris’s eyes, I’m fairly certain it uses a combination of x and z axis to overlap two maps for a quite nice result.
So, say that’s all possible, does that mean having to make a new map for each of the wrinkle sets? That would mean at least four separate displacement textures (2 eye wrinkles and 2 mouth wrinkles), unless of course they could be broken into different vertex groups or somehow mapped out on one single texture file.
Another thought: displacement maps can work alongside bump/normal maps as well, correct? Fairly certain I’ve seen an Andrew Price tutorial with a cliff where he uses both. So, I could still use a good looking skin texture bump or normal map on top of the displacement map, right?
Like Indy mentioned, unfortunately Blender’s not exactly up on stress mapping, which would be perfect for something like this. Then you could have just one displacement texture in place and it would only show through when the quads on the face were stretched out or squished in - lining up with when the wrinkles would actually appear anyhow in real life. Maybe it would be worth throwing it out in the coding and add on developing forums to see if anyone would be up for it. I’m not a coder and I’ve only been working with Blender for like two months, so I just don’t quite have the experience under my belt to go too in depth just yet. But the concepts come first, I suppose, and the technical skills will follow.
Like you said though, will just have to tinker about and see if I can get some of it to work.