Batman Tactical Suit

Project Goals

This project was born from the idea of revisiting the character pipeline I had been working on in the industry, but this time with the time needed to explore each stage of the process, learn, and dig deeper into every decision.

Also, with the opportunity to do it alongside one of my great industry role models, Juan Novelletto. Thanks to his mentorship programme, I was able to go through this process with invaluable guidance, gaining new knowledge and bringing the project to a result that I’m very proud of.

Tools

• Miro and Notion: Moodboard and project organisation.
• ZBrush: High-poly modelling.
• Marvelous Designer: Realistic cloth creation.
• Maya: Low-poly modelling, UVs, and skinning.
• AccuRIG: Initial rig for the body and IDLE animation.
• Substance Painter: Bake and textures.
• Unreal Engine: Lighting, VFX, MetaHuman and renders.

Planning and Ref Hunting

The first hunt is the most important one: finding the right concept. Take your time with it and look for something you would genuinely love to see come to life. That’s my philosophy when starting a new project. I found this concept by Thinh Pham and instantly fell in love with it.

I consider myself a very methodical person and a big believer in organisation. Before starting a character, I like to explore the design and understand how each piece will be constructed. For this, my main tools are Notion and Miro.

Notion for organising tasks, notes, and progress, and Miro for building my moodboards.

I usually divide the moodboard into two areas:

• Construction: where I study how each piece is built.
• Textures: where I define the materials and surface qualities.

I also like to simplify the material library. Even if a concept has ten or more materials, I find it more effective for a game character to establish around five main materials and reuse them throughout the design. This keeps the material language cohesive and the character easier to read.

Blockout

Before starting on the suit itself, I thought it would be important to develop the body first. Even though I knew that most of it wouldn’t be visible in the final character, the body is still the foundation that everything else is built on. Without a solid base and the right proportions, the entire character could end up feeling off.

Once the body was established, I moved on to blocking out the suit. I brought each element into the scene and focused primarily on proportions, shapes, and silhouette. At this stage, I generally try to keep everything as simple as possible, focusing on the big forms rather than details.

You could also start suggesting some folds at this stage, but I prefer to develop those directly in Marvelous Designer. In fact, keeping these initial pieces simple makes them useful later on, since they can be taken into Marvelous Designer and used as a starting point for the final garments.

Cloth Simulation

These garment blockouts are divided into polygroups, with each group representing a different part of the final garment. I then create quick UVs based on these polygroups and import the blockout into Marvelous Designer.

The idea is to establish a solid starting point. Having these simplified garment pieces already blocked out allows me to move into Marvelous Designer with a clear understanding of how each part is going to be constructed.

From here, I clean up and refine these initial patterns, sew them together, and start adapting the fabric properties to achieve the type of folds and behaviour I’m looking for.

High-Poly Modelling

One practice I find particularly useful is breaking down complex pieces into basic planes. By simplifying the construction this way, it becomes much easier to understand how the different parts are going to be built and how they will come together.

Don’t let the constraints define the form, though. Think of this simplified approach as a starting point, a way to establish the main shapes and proportions before pushing the model further.

Low-poly & UVs

When working on a low-poly model, I always keep one thing in mind: it needs to serve both the high-poly model and the animators, while respecting the technical constraints of the project.

That being said, this particular mesh is not optimised in topology count to the extent that a production game asset normally would be. Since this project had no real technical constraints, I gave myself more freedom with the topology.

I wanted enough geometry to properly explore rigging and deformation, as this was my first time taking a character through the process of rigging, skinning and adapting animations.

In the end, I kept the animation relatively simple and adapted an idle animation, allowing me to explore the process while keeping the project moving forward.

One technique I find particularly useful is mirroring UVs. By mirroring certain parts of the character, you can make much more efficient use of your UV space and dedicate more resolution to the areas that need it.

The important trick, though, is to be selective about what you mirror. If you mirror everything, the repetition can become very noticeable, especially in the textures. Instead, I try to hide as much of the mirroring as possible by combining mirrored and unique UVs.

For example, with the boots and gloves here (Green = Mirrored / Orange = Unique), I mirrored some of the areas while keeping others unique. This gives me the benefits of the additional UV space without making the repetition immediately obvious.

Textures

When approaching textures, one of the fundamental things I’ve learned is the importance of blocking out the colours and materiality first. Before getting into the smaller details, I want to make sure the overall colour and material distribution is working and that the character reads clearly as a whole.

For the colour distribution, I decided to follow a classic three-colour approach, dividing the character into three main groups:

• 60% – Cloth + Dark Leather
• 30% – Metals
• 10% – Leather Straps

This gives me a simple visual hierarchy to work with and helps keep the character cohesive before moving on to the more detailed texturing work.

Here’s a simple trick I used to create damage on the garments, although the same technique can be applied to pretty much any material.

I created a base material with negative height, representing the raw leather underneath. By painting over this layer, I could reveal the material below and create the appearance of worn or damaged areas.

Then, I created a second material that uses the information from an Anchor Point. From there, I used an Outline filter to generate the slightly raised borders around the damaged areas. This helps give the damage more definition and creates the impression that the surface has been peeled or worn away rather than simply painted with a different colour.

AccuRIG

For the rigging and posing, I used AccuRIG and Maya for the skinning. AccuRIG is a free tool that provides an automatic rigging system that I found very intuitive and easy to work with.

I am by no means an expert in this matter, but I recommend this video by Abe Leal 3D for understanding how it works.

Render

I like setting up the project in Unreal before finishing the textures in Substance Painter. The final look of the character will ultimately be determined by the render engine, and lighting plays a huge role in how the textures are perceived.

Good lighting can enhance great texturing, while a poor lighting setup can easily hide or even undermine it.

For this character, I kept the lighting setup relatively simple. Since Batman is a fairly dark character, I felt that a white background would help separate him from the environment and showcase the materials more clearly.

For the presentation itself, I also wanted to draw from the way Batman is often introduced in comics and movies, emerging from darkness under dramatic lighting.

Thumbnail Iteration

And finally, one of the most satisfying parts of the process for me is exploring the renders and lighting. I really enjoy iterating on the presentation and seeing how much the final image can change just by experimenting with different poses, lighting setups, and compositions.

For this stage, I gather images from movies, comics, and other artists to build a visual reference library and establish the feeling I’m looking for, especially when it comes to the thumbnail.

Conclusion

That, as you can see, is a little bit of my process. I’m really happy with how the project turned out and with everything I learned along the way. I can’t wait to start working on another character already!

There are always things I would approach differently the next time around, but that’s part of what makes these projects so valuable. Each one can become a foundation for the next one.

I hope this breakdown was helpful, guys. Thanks for reading!