Breakdown: How to Sculpt and Texture a Character with Customisable Features

Introduction

Hey, I'm Alice, a Character Artist from Harrogate, England. I'm 21 and graduating from Game Art at De Montfort University later this year! I'm a lover of stylised art with a background in traditional fine art before starting university. The Game Art course has allowed me to turn my passion for games and my desire to create into a career, and I am excited to talk to 80 Level about my most recent uni project.

"Build-a-Builder" is a construction worker character with multiple modular clothing options, hence the name. Shoutout to the Concept Artist Murath for permitting me to use a couple of their concepts from the mobile game Endless Survival. Production on the game seems to have halted, a real shame because the concepts have so much life and personality.

The angular, blocky illustration style means that I can use the simple clothes as a reference and add more detail myself. I also had the much simpler in-game model designs to reference, where the posed character portraits are hidden in shadow.

Perhaps not the usual process, but I worked from these two concepts to give the 'tough' character, the one on the left, multiple clothing options. I chose him as the dress-up doll because I have a solid reference for what his torso looks like, and the less concepting I have to do myself, the better for a 7-week project.

The idea for the modular aspect came to me once I noticed his sun-burn that implies a tank top he usually wears. Also, I noticed that the jacket tied around his waist was most likely the same one that the other character is wearing. From there, the idea of interchangeable clothing seemed too fun to resist.

To decide on a benchmark game style, I thought about the gaps in my portfolio. I had one project, a realistic zombie bust with haircards inspired by Dead Island 2, and a hand-painted, stylised military character that uses an outline shader. It seemed clear that a semi-stylised character could bridge this gap.

Recreating a pre-existing game's style for your character is primarily about references. Without a good range of examples of how the game's artists chose to tackle different faces, shapes, and materials, you can be risking making ill-informed artistic choices. I chose South of Midnight as my inspiration in part due to the pretty extensive range of ArtStation posts showing clearly many different characters, as well as props.

The style is recognisable for its planar, exaggerated faces. They intentionally include little scratch marks to convey a sense that the characters are carved from wood. Previously, I tackled this style in a group project in my second year. I planned to make twin characters, to keep their base bodies the same, and to tweak only a few things to end up with two characters for a singular character submission.

Nevertheless, I got carried away and made them both entirely different outfits and textures. I really enjoyed this project, and I put in a lot of work to get both of my ladies finished, but there's a lot of room for improvement in their faces and skin texturing. The biggest thing that stands out to me is how shiny they are! The thought of taking a stab at the South of Midnight style once more to improve on my past shortcomings was very motivational for this project.

Sculpting

With this piece, I wanted to explore anatomy and create a male character for the first time since my first year. In ZBrush, I broke down his body into basic elements I could move and adjust easily for a base body. It wasn't until I was completely happy with the scale and placement of his muscles that I merged the pieces into one.

Using references from the book Anatomy For Sculptors by Uldis Zarins, online libraries of photography for figure drawing, and, as the character is muscular, images of bodybuilders to clearly see individual muscles. I also attended a life drawing class with a male model for a greater understanding. I really recommend keeping up with traditional art while undertaking a 3D project to stop yourself from developing square eyes!

As South of Midnight characters are very planar and reminiscent of wood carvings, they're also frequently asymmetrical in the face, feature harsh and sharp folds, and exaggerated proportions. To achieve the angular effect, I used brushes like Flatten, TrimDynamic, and TrimAdaptive to break up any curved surfaces.

While the head model was still low-poly, I parted the lips (by masking off a strip where his lips met and deleting it) and made two polygroups for the upper and lower jaw to be able to hide either to see inside the head. Then, ZModeller can be used to extrude a mouth bag from the new hole into the head. His gums and teeth are all sculpted as separate floating geometry inside this cavity.

Before I marked the head sculpt as complete, I tested out facial expressions using layers in ZBrush. As the face is sculpted expressionless, it helps me to see how it would look posed and emoting in-game, and layers provide a really nice non-destructive option to try this. I simply made a handful of layers with different extremes for his mouth, eyes, and eyebrows.

With the layer sliders, I could then customise multiple expressions, including the cocky smirk seen in the concept art. Being able to visualise how a character's features or proportions will work with how you plan to pose them can be helpful to avoid having to come back to the sculpt later in the pipeline if you're unhappy.

In total, I sculpted his torso, head, trousers, and shoes as well as the interchangeable elements: a jacket, the jacket tied around his waist, a hard hat, a vest, a pair of gloves, a leather apron, and some tools. There's a sledgehammer, a long saw, and three different chisels that can be worn in the holder on his apron. I aimed to challenge myself by sculpting his anatomy, as well as not using a clothing simulation software like Marvelous Designer, so I had to sculpt all the folds myself. I was proud of how it came out!

UV Unwrapping

Due to the modularity of this character, I had to rethink my usual approach to planning UV maps. Normally, I'd have a sheet for the head, a couple for the body/clothes, for eyes, and for accessories, packing anything of the same material together. My dilemma is that there are multiple clothing options made of the same fabric, like his jacket, that cannot co-exist on the model together, so how can I maximise UV space? 

My solution is to favour the topology that would be seen always, such as the trousers and shoes, which have no other modular pieces, and pack them together. I chose to split the head and hands from the torso, so that if he is wearing the jacket, the entire torso sheet doesn't need to be used. It also means that the texel density is more equal over the skin. To retopologise, I used 3ds Max, keeping a consistent grid between the layers of clothing so that he can deform well, as well as building in the necessary loops for animation.

Texturing

I used Substance 3D Painter to bake and texture the model. I baked out 4k maps in order to have lovely high-quality textures to then be compressed to their game-ready size, which generally looks better than texturing at the smaller size off the bat. From my high-poly, I baked: Normal map, World Space Normal, Position, AO, Curvature, and Color ID. 

I apply normal and AO separately in folders with masks to have complete control over their strength and appearance on the model, rather than leaving them in Substance 3D's 'Mesh Maps' area. This can be a great, quick way of fixing very minor baking errors without having to re-bake, edit the model, or export the maps into Photoshop!

Exploded Bake setup in 3ds Max:

With a character that has this many overlapping parts, it was helpful for me to set out a scene like this in 3ds Max with 3 configurations of clothing. It allows me to see all sides of the different meshes without having to hide any objects, which gets laggy for me when I have a lot of layers by the end of texturing.

To make his tattoos, I drew my own version of the ones I could see on the concept's front view in Photoshop, the MMXIX date, the skull with a crown, and the 'hate' on his knuckles. I tried to keep the original chunky outline art style while scaling up the detail.

I had no back view of this concept, but it looked so bizarre having many statement pieces on his front and none on his back. I wanted to design him another tattoo that would continue the 'dangerous' theme, so I researched tattoos with unfriendly meanings and found a classic design, a snake handshake meaning 'trust no one'.

It seemed fitting and interesting, so I redesigned it for my character. I simplified the details and made the shapes more angular in order to be cohesive and readable at a distance. Initially, I had planned to put it along his lower back, but as he can wear a vest that would cover it, I decided to place it up on the widest part of his back so it peeks out when he's wearing the vest.

The most challenging aspect of texturing was trying to make the clothing material, walking the fine line between realistically conveying the properties of the material and deliberately simplifying and abstracting elements to achieve the South of Midnight style. This took a lot of working and reworking, primarily on the largest areas, the leather and denim.

I struggled to make the leather apron feel 'real' until the final stage, where I used layers of positive and negative height to add the impression of tension folds and sagging. This finishing touch is when it finally clicked for me, and I felt happy with the level of fidelity.

To keep the character optimised and under 35k tris, I baked down the details on the denim, such as the pockets, seams, and zips, as they don't affect the silhouette. I used a lot of hand-painted highlights on raised edges and emphasized shadows to give the wear and tear on the denim more plausibility. After analysing the South of Midnight character's clothing, I noticed that they used Substance 3D Painter's built-in zipper brushes in some cases, so I found it appropriate to use them on mine.

Presentation

For university, we are required to present our characters in Unreal Engine 5. The process for setting up a scene for a character in Unreal is straightforward, but a few things were different for this project due to the modularity.

I set up a small interactive level using a blueprint and a fixed camera that allows the player to press a button, and the Builder cycles through a range of his outfits. I would love to expand this project into a full character customisation game. Options for different tattoos and a larger range of clothing would be a really fun challenge.

My lecturer, Jesse Olchawa (ArtStation - Jesse Olchawa), helped me make full colour customisation for each of the clothing items. The process included masking out each area/item I wanted to be able to affect separately in Substance 3D Painter, exporting them, and then packing said masks into one map in Substance 3D Designer.

We could then create custom material instances and add parameters for hue, intensity, and even an additional map for dirt. I created this character turnaround by recording the same turntable spin in Unreal Engine's Movie Render Queue and then editing them together in After Effects. The video showcases the capabilities of the colour and clothing customisation pretty effectively.

Posing the character is a very important step for me presentationally. I used Mixamo for the pose seen in the turnaround video. Something I took into consideration was his layers of clothes when bringing my model into Mixamo. To be able to make this video, all the clothes needed to be imported together to be posed together in Mixamo. Mixamo is a really effective way to apply a pose to your character, which is a must for a portfolio, in my opinion.

Sharing an unposed version of your character is useful for technical reasons, but choosing a pose that highlights the character's personality, their props, or features like their mouth bag is what I would recommend. I created a custom pose for the builder in 3ds Max to show off the props, one of the poses in Murath's concept art, where the character bends the saw. To make the pose, I would select an arm, for example, and move it into place, then bend the elbow, then the wrist, then each finger.

This obviously distorts the topology, but using the Conform brush, the same I use to keep topology neat when retopping, generally returns the grid pattern and softens where I bent the limbs. It also helps to use the Shift brush to return some lost shape, such as dragging out some topology to make the angular elbow or a pointy knuckle. A couple of screenshots from my blog about how I planned out my lighting and presentational setup.

Conclusion

This project was a great experience. It took 7 weeks from finding a concept to the final presentation, and I feel more confident and more efficient with every character I make. It's important to be reasonable with what you can produce in a time frame, and I find it very helpful to have planned elements of your character that you can either add if you find yourself ahead, or sacrifice if you're behind, without ruining the whole project.

I had to give up on the idea of giving this character the hair he has in the concept, but I don't find it detracts from the final character (a successful contingency plan!). I really enjoyed tackling the new challenges that this modular character posed.

I'm only 3 years into my 3D journey, having had no real experience in anything 3D before starting my degree. Despite this, I feel like an entirely different artist than when I started. The Game Art course at DMU has given me a great amount of support as well as pushed me to be better than I thought I could be. I think I only got to this point by being able to take and act upon feedback. My advice to beginners would be that constructive criticism can be hard to hear, but I have found it to always be worth being receptive to.

You can check out a more detailed step-by-step for this project that helps explain specific workflows on my blog page: Alice Brandom - Builder Project.

Alice Brandom, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins