Bound

Project

This character “Bound” started as a short portfolio iteration, with a focus on close-up details, emotion, and facial expression. The character is meant to feel wild, unstable, and tortured , someone clearly shaped by suffering.

The main priority was readability, emotion, and storytelling rather than technical limits.

Goals

The main goals of this project were:

• To focus on strong emotional expression and visual storytelling
• To push close-up facial details
• To improve overall texture quality
• To render the character in Marmoset Toolbag using ACES tone mapping, which I hadn’t used before

Tools

• ZBrush (Sculpting)
• Maya (Low poly, UV, hair, overall character assembling)
• GS Curve Tools (Hair cards placement)
• XGen (hair texture and card placement generation)
• Maya MASH system for chains
• Substance Painter (Texturing)
• Photoshop (Hair texture tweaks)
• Marmoset Toolbag (Render and shaders setup)

Concept & Inspiration

I started this project using the “Practice” concept by Thibaut Leduc, which I was allowed to work from. The concept instantly set the emotional direction of the character.

The wide-open mouth, exposed teeth, and stretched facial anatomy naturally pushed the focus toward aggression, discomfort, and strong expression – exactly what I wanted to explore in close-up shots.

Another nice thing about the concept was the lack of heavy accessories or secondary design elements. That gave me a lot of freedom to adapt it for 3D, make design decisions that work better for my needs, and push the character more toward a humanoid direction rather than a straight creature.

References

I always spend some time gathering as many references as possible before starting a project, as it helps a lot with decision-making and problem-solving throughout the process.

Blockout

I started this project from a simple base mesh and adjusted the proportions and anatomy to fit my needs. Once the blockout was ready, I quickly brought it into a render engine (or any software with proper lighting) to check how the proportions read under real light.

ZBrush lighting can be a bit misleading, so this step helps catch issues early and make sure the asset works in its environment. On this stage it was mostly Move brush, Clay brush, DamStandard and Polish by Features.

Highpoly (Primary & Secondary shapes)

I built the character using a primary, secondary, and tertiary shape approach, starting with strong silhouettes and proportions, then refining anatomy and facial planes, and finishing with skin detail, wrinkles, and scars.

The focus was on realism, readability, and expression, using mostly standard ZBrush brushes like Move, Standard, Clay, Dam Standard, Morph brush. When I locked my secondary forms I exported my second subD level as low poly base.

UV

For this project, I kept the asset setup relatively simple. The character body uses two UV sets: one for the head and one shared set for the body and accessories.

To speed up the process and keep things organized, most character parts were unwrapped into simple square layouts.

While this does introduce some stretching, it happens mostly in areas that are either hidden or less noticeable, such as regions covered by hair or chains, so it doesn’t affect the final visual quality.

One small but intentional decision was the mouth UVs. Instead of unfolding it in the extreme open mouth pose, I laid it out closer to a relaxed position. This was done on purpose so that later, when adding tiling details like pores and fine wrinkles, the texture would stretch naturally during the open-mouth expression, similar to how skin behaves in real life.

The face UVs were also given more space overall to preserve sharper texture detail where it matters most.

High Poly (Tertiary Shapes)

After locking the low poly in Maya, I brought it back into ZBrush and projected the primary and secondary forms to get a new high poly with proper UVs. From there, I focused on adding small surface details.

At this stage, it’s very easy to ruin the sculpt with too much pore noise, so I worked almost entirely using layers. All pores, scars, and surface details were done on separate layers, which makes it easy to tweak or remove them at any point.

I usually store a Morph Target before adding any tiling noise.

This way I can control the noise locally using the Morph Brush, and everything still stays layer-based. I also tend to make details a bit stronger than needed and then dial them back with the layer slider, which gives more control and flexibility later on.

After my HP was ready, I exported second subD level as my main low poly, then before importing it to Substance Painter I ran it through Maya where I unlocked normals, set up hard edges and then exported it for texturing and rendering.

This was done to avoid low poly shading issues.

Texturing

During the texturing stage, my main goals were:

• To build the textures around the mouth and facial expression, so they support and enhance the emotion
• To make the skin feel damaged and worn, helping to tell the character’s story through surface detail

Texturing process: I started with the skin albedo, by zoning the skin colours. Yellow colour for forehead and bony areas, reddish around cheeks, nose and ears and bluish around jaw, same process for the torso.

Also I split head texturing into groups corresponding to its materials (Face, gums, tongue, teeth).

Overall, I was trying to recreate not a healthy, aged, peeled face that will support character mood. Main skin texturing references were photos of “Porphyria” disease.

After finishing the albedo, I moved on to building the roughness, SSS, specular, and cavity maps. These were created using baked maps such as curvature and AO, combined with anchor points taken from the albedo.

I also created an additional mask for adding tiling normal map details later in the render engine.

For texture export, I used a standard PBR setup with some small tweaks. All black-and-white maps built in the layer stack were packed into a single texture using different channels.

This makes them much easier to control later in the render engine and is also a good habit from an optimization standpoint.

Accessory (Chains)

For the chains, most of the work was done directly in ZBrush, where I sculpted the main surface and damage details. Because of that, the texturing stage was fairly quick.

In Substance Painter, I started with a premade material (Steel Ruined) and then added a few extra layers on top to better match the character.

Hair

Goal was to create old oily messy hair.

To generate the hair textures, I used workflow in Maya with XGen:

• Drew curves to define the overall hair flow
• Converted the curves into XGen guides
• Adjusted density and stacked modifiers
• Exported the hair chunks as MEL files and re-imported them as curves
• Used a sweep profile to add thickness and create a high-poly hair model

The resulting hair high poly was then baked down onto planes for use as hair card textures.

I baked AO, curvature, height, and opacity maps.

The albedo was kept simple, a black-and-white base with an AO layer multiplied on top, plus subtle gradients to darken the hair roots.

For hair placement, I used hair chunks made of 3–4 cards instead of single hair card, which helped build volume much faster. The chunks were placed using GS Curve Tools, binding them to curves for better control over flow and direction.

This approach is inspired by the workflow of Johan Lithvall.

Beard, lashes and brows cards were placed with XGen:

• Set up guides
• Drew density mask
• Adjusted density and stacked modifiers
• Exported the hair as MEL files and re-imported them as curves
• In GS Curve Tools script used function curve to card

Eye

The eye setup in this project uses a standard two-mesh structure: an inner eyeball and an outer shell.

For the eye textures, I built the albedo in Photoshop by combining a few different reference images. After that, I created a black-and-white version and imported it into Substance Painter, where I generated a normal map by converting the grayscale values into height and adjusting it to get subtle surface detail.

Render & Material setup

As soon as I started texturing, I set up a lookdev scene in Marmoset Toolbag and connected it directly to my textures from Substance.

This way, Marmoset became my main viewport for checking textures and materials throughout the process.

I rendered the character using ACES tone mapping, which was new for me on this project.

ACES can easily crush midtones, highlights, and shadows if you’re not careful, but at the same time it makes colours feel very punchy. This made it easier to create dramatic lighting setups, which worked especially well for anatomy-focused and expressive renders. I also tweaked tone mapping settings a little to fix ACES downsides.

From shaders perspective I set up 3 main shaders: Hair, Skin and Eye.

Final touches

As a final touch, I added saliva and a tear line, which helped push the realism, especially in close-up shots.

The saliva serves two purposes: first, it adds an extra layer of visual detail, and second, it works as a subtle transition between the gums and teeth, making the mouth feel less “separated” and more organic. The saliva mesh was created in ZBrush, then remeshed and decimated to keep it lightweight.

The tear line is a simple plane sitting on top of the eyelid, helping sell the wetness and specular highlights around the eyes.

Conclusion

This project served as a way to refine my approach to facial expression and close-up detail. It helped validate several workflow decisions while also highlighting areas to push further in future character work, particularly in expression clarity and surface detail control.

If you have any questions, suggestions or just want to say hi, feel free to contact me, Oleksandr Babych. Thank you!