The sculping stage is also a concept stage, so I iterate with the art team on the sculpt until we’re happy with the result. I have basic concepts to work with, but I have a lot of creative freedom in the sculpting process.

When I’m happy with the sculpt, I retopologize so I can have clean UVs for texturing and so it can deform nicely for the portrait pose. The character specifically had a lot of hard surface work to begin with, so not everything has to be retopologized. But some more organic characters have to be entirely retopologized.

I utilized Substance Designer and Painter to create PBR textures for Arnold. I often use UDIMs, since portraits can be very close up and at a high resolution. We shoot for somewhere in between realistic and stylized materials; not completely grungy but also not completely lacking of texture detail.

I’ll go back into zbrush with the final topology and pose the character for a render, often going back between Zbrush and Maya with my shot set up.

I set up the materials and shader graph in Maya, and adjust the shot and lighting until I’m happy with the result. I bring that into Photoshop and do some small touch-ups, and in this case render a simple background and paint over that a bit.

And we’re only halfway done, because I have to make a low poly model for the realtime character in-game.

I do a mix of automated texturing and hand-painted texturing. I bake the high poly geometry onto the low poly, and use a substance I built (shown below) to get a starting point for the diffuse. I touch that up with hand painting until I’m happy with it.

I rig and animate in Maya to create some looping animations we use in game, such as idle, walk, attack, and some fun flavor animations. Then I export into Unity to see it in game, and then revise based on what we see in game.