Demon Hunter

Project

My journey began with a BA in Computer Games Art, which I completed in 2021. In 2023, I decided to hone my skills through the online program at Think Tank Training Centre, a highly regarded institution that offers comprehensive CGA and CGI courses.

During this time, I had the privilege of learning from industry professionals who provided in-depth insights into the contemporary pipeline and best practices for character creation in games.

This project focuses on showcasing an animation-ready character using metahuman integration.

For this article, I will break down the process into the following steps:

1. Reference Gathering
2. Sculpting Phase
3. Retopology and UVs
4. Texturing
5. Hair Creation
6. Shaders, Lighting, and Renders Setup

The programs used for this project were: PureRef, Zbrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, R3ds Zwrap, Substance Painter, RizomUVs, Fibershop, and Unreal Engine 5.

References, Planning & Organisation

It is essential to build a well-rounded reference board straight away to avoid any pauses in the middle of work.
To achieve a successful and believable character, I gathered references from various sources, namely:

1. Real life – Real-life references are crucial for grounding a character so that we can push the boundaries to achieve the fantasy feel. In this case, I gathered real-life references for the character’s clothes, the jousting shield, the character’s face, sword, and more.
2. Textures – In order to build believable materials, I gathered many close-up references of materials my character would wear, such as linen for the sleeve, different types of leather grain, paint layers on metal, etc.
3. Other 3D projects – I like to have a quality goal, so I gathered references from talented 3D artists whose style I aimed for, including works from “Baldur’s Gate 3,” “God of War,” “Elden Ring,” “Assassin’s Creed,” and “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.”
4. Film and TV – For references such as dragon skin, the demon head, and the hard-angle gauntlet. Some titles on my board were “The Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones,” and “Dune.”
5. Lighting and Mood – Setting the mood is essential for the character. Lighting setups can make or break a great character, so I gathered references from films and character artists’ renders.

Sculpting

Blockout

The blockout phase should establish three key aspects of a compelling character: volume, shape, and silhouette.

At this stage, I aimed to define the character’s height, body mass, proportions, and the size of all surrounding objects.

Iteration is crucial here, so keeping meshes low-poly allows for quick adjustments. For instance, the armor parts close to the skin suggest that the character is not very muscular, so adjustments were made from the inside out to maintain the intended style while respecting underlying anatomy.

For proper scaling, your character should be life-sized, as texturing and shading can be affected by scale.

You can either import a height-accurate cube from Maya into ZBrush or use ZBrush’s transpose tool to measure and set the height.

I recommend Outgang’s video on ZBrush scaling, which can be challenging for beginners. After several iterations and proportion changes, the final height of this character was set to 190 cm.

Refining

Now it’s time to refine the assets. Clean topology is essential for detailing, so ZRemesher, ZModeler, and quick retopology in Maya are invaluable at this stage.

For creating details, I used ZBrush’s Standard, Claybuildup, Move, and DamStandard brushes. For more specific details, I used the Gio_Soft_Forms brush due to its organic feel compared to DamStandard.

Library

This character features various small items, such as buckles and vials, which I modeled in Maya and then imported into ZBrush for detailing and placement.

This allowed me to create a library of reusable objects that could easily be swapped without having to recreate each item from scratch.

Armour

The character’s armor is worn and battle-scarred. I modeled it using a mix of blockout, retopology in Maya, and detailing in ZBrush to add wear and scratches for a battered look. Breaking complex shapes into different subtools is essential for achieving this detail.

Marvelous Designer

Marvelous is incredible at getting good results fast. For this project, I utilized Marvelous in two ways:

I retopologized the hood and the shirt in Maya, but for the boots, I simply used the Marvelous mesh to project the folds onto my boots.

Learning Marvelous can be tricky as it involves a level of understanding of sewing patterns.

I found Albina Skripka to be very helpful, as she breaks down the patterns for the clothing she designs.

Pickaxe

I modeled this asset from simple shapes like cylinders and spheres.

I took a lot of references from Renaissance sculptures, such as Michelangelo’s David for the hand. For the hand, I duplicated my mesh’s hand and posed it into the desired position.

Head and Hand

For this project, I chose Timothée Chalamet as my reference because I thought his features were fitting for what I wanted to achieve.

From the beginning, I wanted to integrate this character into Unreal and use their Metahuman mesh and skin shader. However, if you have a pre-existing character already created and want to turn it into a Metahuman mesh, I suggest following this tutorial by Frankie E.

Essentially, if you are looking to use scan data for the textures, you can first use ZWrap/Wrap to adapt the source mesh to your mesh, create a Metahuman Identity inside Unreal Engine.

Export your custom Metahuman from Bridge to Maya, and project details and scan data from your mesh to the custom Metahuman.

This pipeline allows for a fully rigged Metahuman that looks like your custom character, including textures.

For this project, I used an asset from 3D Scanstore to get its displacement and albedo onto my character.

I used ZWrap in ZBrush for this purpose. After wrapping, I projected the detail onto my Metahuman basemesh and drew additional wrinkles around the nasolabial fold and eyes by hand.

I recommend this tutorial for this part as it can be confusing for beginners.

Retopology & UVs

Retopology was done in Maya using Quad Draw.

The key to good topology is to keep polygon density as even as possible throughout the body, with the secret being to match vertices where meshes come close to each other so clipping doesn’t occur.

As for unwrapping and laying out the UVs, I used Rizom. I found Rizom great for straightening UV shells, and it felt quite intuitive overall. The packing system by groups makes packing and organizing very easy.

For those starting out, Rizom offers concise and to-the-point YouTube tutorials.

Texturing

Skin

I dedicated a lot of time to polishing and iterating textures, aiming to include at least one interesting detail in each asset.

One crucial tip I learned is to focus on big color breakups from a distance, so zooming out and working from afar is essential when applying base and break up colors.

Always import your mesh into your preferred engine at this point as it will allow you faster iterations between the two as you export/import.

Before starting, there were a few changes I made to the viewport in Substance:

1. Display Settings > Environment Settings > Environment Map – Studio Tomoco, as I found it gave me the closest fidelity between Substance and Unreal.
2. Shader Settings > Shader Parameters > Base Surface > Specular Quality – Very High, to help understand the degree of reflectivity in your scene.
3. Edit > Project Configuration > Color Management > OpenColorIO Configuration > ACES 1.2 – Unreal Engine has ACES tone mapping enabled by default, so changing this setting in Substance allowed for closer fidelity between Substance Viewport and Unreal Engine.

First, I applied a colour similar to the concept to each asset to ensure the colours were well-balanced and visually appealing together.

The albedo from 3DScanstore and the actual skin colour of the character in the concept are wildly different. To achieve a closer look, I used a HSL to desaturate the tone, added yellow/blue hues and brightened the skin so he would look even paler.

Then, I started building on this by using procedural layers such as maps generated from baking (AO, Curvature, etc), with these maps I was able to tweak the skin further by re-adding some of the lost reds where I wanted, to add spots and blemishes, tonal maps and freckles.

Magdalena Dadela goes into an incredible in-depth skin texture tutorial here.

For the dark eyes and veins, I gathered references from both dark under-eye circles and pictures from Geralt in the TV adaptation of “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” as they were quite close to the result I wanted.

The mask for the veins was fully created by hand and tweaked until it looked believable.

Adding a bit of height and fading out the ends made it look integrated into the skin.

Dragonskin

The dragon skin was by far the hardest part of this project. Not only do dragons not exist, but I had to texture it and make it look believable as though it were part of a real living being.

The asset required blending two distinct materials—scales and leather—into a cohesive design while staying true to the concept’s colors.

Hood

The torn parts on the hood were made in Zbrush and then baked down onto my one-sided mesh’s opacity map in Substance Painter. I used Slime Bridge to create the frayed fibers on the edges.

Chest

To make metal interesting, it needs to have colour variation. In these pictures, you can see the colour variation on my chest-plate.

I also used a lighter colour to highlight edges and darker colours for holes and slopes.

This is a method used to emphasise depth and wear and tear. My metal texturing was heavily inspired by Jared Chavez’s video, where he breaks down how he textured his orc’s armour.

And here are the texturing results!

Hair

For this project, I used a real-time pipeline of hair card creation:

1. Gathered References for the hairstyle;
2. Modelled the hair in Zbrush to establish direction, shape and volume;
3. Created textures in Fibershop using the brush tool and modifiers;

Because my character had short hair, I decided to split the 4k map in two horizontally, as the hair wouldn’t be long or stretched, leaving ample space for the other groom elements like the beard, eyelashes, and eyebrows.

After this, I used GSCurvetools in Maya to place the hair following Hazel Brown’s incredible tutorial on YouTube.

I recommend both the plugin and the tutorial immensely. Other tutorials I found quite useful were:

Ellie Porfyridou’s, Vadim Sorici’s and Emmanuel Lecouturier’s.

I also found hair references from games such as “Baldur’s Gate 3” and “Hogwarts Legacy” grooms to be helpful in my project.

The secret to good and believable hair is the layering. With GSCurvetools, you can easily separate sections of the hair by applying these to different layers available in the GSCurvetools menu.

GSCurvetool’s creator George Sladkovsky offers an extensive and in-depth tutorial on how to work with this plugin.

It is also important to start exporting the hair and creating a shader early on, so you can make adjustments as you go.

In this case, I exported into Unreal Engine and Marmoset Toolbag to make sure the hairstyle looked generally solid.

Lighting, Shaders & Renders

I intended to light the character as if it were nighttime from the start of the project.

To achieve this, I created a project in Unreal using the “Metahuman Lighting” project available for free on Epic Games. Inside, there are a couple of different pre-existent light scenes. I chose the moonlight one for this project.

Lighting

One of the most common lighting techniques is Rembrandt Lighting, defined by an illuminated triangle under the eye of the subject on the opposite side of the main light source.

From then, with my three-point lighting established, I created smaller lights in specific areas that needed to be lifted. You can find a really in-depth guide about lighting in CG Cinematography.

There are also a few steps and settings when using an unbound post-processing volume that one must tick to achieve the best results.

Have a look at my post-process volume settings below:

Shaders

Since I was using the Metahuman mesh, I was able to use the Metahuman Skin Shader for this project. I plugged all my maps in and tweaked them until I had a satisfactory result.

For the hair, I migrated the material from the template Digital Humans. For shorter hair such as eyebrows, eyelashes and beard, I created an instance material and had to tick the option “Eyebrow” for the textures to show up clearly as these hairs are closer to the skin.

For everything else, I followed this incredible tutorial by Jared Chavez and built my master material.

When it came to rendering, I set up most of the cameras’ mm at 105 and then went on to create a Movie Render Queue, which I set up following William Faucher’s incredibly detailed video.

Conclusion

This project allowed me to delve deeper into engine technicalities and specifics. With Unreal Engine’s increasing flexibility and power, I have no doubt it will be used ever more often by studios for game and film creation.

It was a challenging but rewarding experience that significantly enhanced my skills and knowledge to further improve my 3D Character Art skills.

And here are the results. I hope this article has been of some small help. If you have any lingering questions, feel free to reach out to me on my socials. Thanks for reading!