Breakdown: Toon-Style Character with Inking in ZBrush & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hey guys, I’m Ken, I also go by StylizedRamen on ArtStation and X/Twitter. I’m a Stylized 3D Character Artist and Automotive 3D CAD Designer. First of all, I’d like to thank Gloria for inviting me to this interview at 80 Level. I follow and use a lot of the articles on this website, so I’m absolutely thrilled to be contributing here!

I started my 3D art journey back in 2020 when work-from-home was established at my office. Admittedly, I spent a lot of my newly found free time playing video games, even going as far as gaming during online Zoom meetings. And feeling a bit guilty, I wanted to be more productive and perhaps learn something new. I figured, “Hey, I love video games, I love art, and I already work in a 3D-adjacent career, why not give 3D art a try?”.

I slowly got the ball rolling when I created my first donut in Blender. I remember feeling so proud of myself, and yet a bit overwhelmed with what I just learned. I felt the tutorial was a little too broad and wanted a more tailored experience. I started following other YouTube tutorials and even bought some Udemy courses along the way. When I eventually hit a wall in my studies, I finally enrolled in an art bootcamp called Think Tank Online, specializing in 3D character art. Here, I learned common workflow practices, pipelines, and, of course, industry-standard software like ZBrush, Maya, and Substance 3D Painter.

Inspiration

Having finished my previous character, The Hound, I wanted to take a 180 and do something completely different. I wanted to challenge myself with something organic, with more fabrics, while minimizing hard-surface assets as much as possible. I also wanted to create a modular outfit for the character, which meant sacrificing polycount in order to separate multiple assets. I also wanted to try a little more hand-painting this time around, or at least try to get that painted look. Phantom of the Casino caught my eye because it checked a lot of the boxes I was looking for. With regards to references, I like to go through ArtStation and research styles I like. But having recently watched a playthrough of Telltale Games’ Wolf Among Us, I knew I wanted to try some inking on the character as well.

References

The first thing I like to do when I start a new character is determine the character’s personality. Given the “casino” moniker of the character, I assumed her personality would be a little bit mischievous. I knew I wanted her to have a cute face that would invite trust and sharp, keen eyes that depicted experience. So I looked for any reference images I could find that demonstrated these important aspects of her personality, and hopefully provided me with some art direction as well! Below is an example of the reference images I collected for her face. I would often collect images like these for almost all aspects of the character. 

Modeling

Preparation & Planning

When I start a new project, I like to summarize the character’s assets and plan out the UV groups and materials. Even if it doesn’t always go to plan, it’s always nice to have a guideline and a set of reminders to follow. And if you’re ever feeling a bit overwhelmed, it’s great to use it as a step-by-step checklist. Here’s what that would look like:

Next, we figure out the proportions. Academic proportions of the human body are often 7 1/2 heads tall. While god-like or superhero bodies are 9 heads tall, allowing for longer limbs and a larger chest. Here, I head to Photoshop and do a quick edit of our concept art and determine that our character uses heroic proportions at approximately 9 heads.

For complex shapes like the hair, I like to go into Photoshop and quickly outline each hair clump to get a better understanding of the hair separation. I was fortunate enough to have the concept artist clearly define her hair from different angles. You can also use this method to separate assets that obscure or layer over each other. I find that it helps to break down your character to its most basic shapes and forms; this way, you won’t be completely overwhelmed. Once the planning is all done, I finally dive into ZBrush or Maya to start the blockout.

I follow the standard hierarchical process of sculpting; we start with Primary Forms, then Secondary Forms, and finally Tertiary Forms. But the process for me is always iterative. Sometimes I go back and adjust my primary and secondary forms in the later stages.

Blockouts – Primary Forms

Head Blockout

To save time, I used ZBrush’s default female base mesh. But I wasn’t happy with the head, so I ended up recreating it from a sphere, keeping the polycount low and blocking out the facial landmarks. I like to use a low value for my DynaMesh when starting. This lets me quickly form shapes and fill out the silhouette. Personally, I stop here with the blockout of the head. I don’t like going into detail this early, as I tend to go back and reiterate on my sculpts a lot. We only need the most basic shapes for now, and at this stage of the blockout, less is more! 

I then copied and pasted 9 of the heads over each other to use as a measuring stick for the body proportions.

Hair Blockout

For the hair blockout, I like to take a sphere and plop it on top of the head and start pulling it apart with the Move brush. During the blockout stage, we’re not necessarily looking to separate all the hair clumps yet; we only need to fill out the silhouette that we sketched in our hair planning earlier. Nothing too crazy here, just DynaMesh when geometry is needed, and keep the polycount low. I ended up separating the front hair bang as it was a standout piece in the silhouette from a different angle. 

Body Blockout

Using ZBrush’s female base mesh, I modified it by exaggerating certain “peaks” on the body, such as the shoulders, elbows, forearms, knuckles, hips, calves, etc. I also elongated the arms and legs to fit our heroic proportions. Then I sculpted these almost flat planar surfaces towards the “peaks” to help lure the eyes towards them. This gave it a more stylized appearance.

Shirt Blockout

When I was happy with the body, I began work on the blockout of the clothing. The process is pretty standard practice: Mask an area of the body that matches the shape of your clothing and Extract. Both the shirt and the pants were masked and extracted directly from the body. I outline the steps I take in the images below:

If you like, you can even apply Gravity to this mesh to simulate realistic folds, just don’t forget to add subdivision levels first. Michael Pavlovich has an excellent YouTube series that covers this. But for this project, we’re sticking with manual sculpting.

Miscellaneous Blockouts

As for the blockouts of less organic assets like belts and bags, I generally use primitives such as cubes, cylinders, and planes with ZModeler. When using ZModeler, I try to keep the topology as clean as possible. It’s very important to get the topology right, as it will dictate a lot of your modelling and sculpting work in the later stages. Below, I outline what primitives I used for the backpack. Try to break down each asset into its simplest shapes, and you’ll quickly recognize what you can achieve with primitives.

Mid-Poly Pass – Secondary Forms

If the blockout stage was used to achieve the primary forms of the character, the mid-poly pass will break these primary forms into smaller secondary forms, like muscle structures, large folds on the pants, or the metal trimming on a pauldron. This is the stage that I spend the most time on, because, to be honest, a lot of the high-poly pass can be done in texturing. And with stylized art, it’s a lot easier to tackle details in the texturing phase. At this stage, I would start defining mesh features and breaking up the silhouettes of my primary forms. 

The Face

I like to finish sculpting the facial features at this point. I still try to keep my polycount as low as possible, only increasing with Dynamesh when I need the extra geometry. I also create the mouth bag, teeth, and tongue at this stage. When I’m happy with the face, I start the ZRemesh process to reduce the polycount and clean up the topology. We’ll be applying Subdivision levels in our final stage of sculpting, so it’s important to have a clean and even topology. To do this, I like to use PolygroupIt with ZRemesher.

PolygroupIt

If you haven’t used PolygroupIt, I highly recommend giving it a try! It’s especially useful as it allows you to take a heavy DynaMesh model and ZRemesh it with clean topology and edge flow, while separating certain features into different polygroups. It’s similar to the ZRemesh Guides and Topology brushes, but I much prefer this method of clean topology. IR Sculpts has a great video on it.

The Hair

For the hair, I ended up using Renaud Galand’s RenHair brush. It’s a very simple hair brush that leaves room for additional sculpting. I tweak the settings a little under the Stroke menu and apply Creases and Dynamic Subdivision. 

ZModeler & Dynamic Subdivisions

In the case of the accessories like the bags and belts, I used a workflow involving ZModeler, Dynamic SubDiv, and Creases. Dynamic SubDiv is invaluable in this workflow as it allows us to preview subdivision levels without committing to a heavier polycount. It’s always easier to adjust a low-polycount mesh after all! I tend to use Dynamic SubDiv at level 4 or 5, and Creases at level 1 or 2, depending on my preferences for the asset.

Clothing

For our example below, we’ll be working with the pants. Similar to the shirt, the pants were Masked and Extracted from the body and then ZRemeshed into a clean topology. Then a Subdivision Level of 3 was applied. We won’t be using Dynamic SubDiv here as it’s not practical when we need the extra geometry for the folds. I then applied Morph Targets and Layers before sculpting. I like to use these tools in my workflow as they are non-destructive. We can simply tune the existing folds with the Layer’s slider or alternatively, use the Morph brush to remove them completely. 

When sculpting folds, I like to use PMG’s GIO brush with Lazy Mouse set to 30, alternating using the ALT key to push the brush in or out. When sculpting folds, try to keep your strokes clean and precise, one quick swipe and no wobbly lines! I use a drawing tablet, so I’m able to leverage the pen pressure here as well. If you’re struggling with the folds, I highly suggest taking a look at Kirill Senzu’s guide on Clothes and Folds. He provides some invaluable tips and tricks in his tutorial!

High-Poly Pass – Tertiary Forms

The final stage is the high-poly pass, which adds our tertiary forms, the smallest details. This includes skin pores, wrinkles on clothes, and small surface imperfections. We’ll be using Morph Targets and Layers again for this workflow. For this example, we’ll be taking a look at the pauldron. First, I apply the Dynamic SubDivisions and Creases to my mesh. This will confirm the “preview” mesh and create real geometry. Next, I apply a Morph Target and a Layer. This allows me to preserve the original mesh design and control how much detail is shown. 

I’m a huge fan of Michael Vicente’s Orb Brush set. I use his brushes on a lot of my stylized sculpts. We’ll be using his brushes to do a little storytelling on our pauldron by adding small imperfections and damages. But before we start sculpting, I like to create separate Layers for each brush that I use. So, for example, I’ll have a separate Layer for the Orb Slashes and another separate Layer for my Orb Flatten/Trim Dynamic. Below are screenshots of my process. I didn’t apply any special Surface Noise or Textures, as I planned to use Substance 3D Painter to provide those details. 

I’ve also outlined all the brushes I’ve used on other aspects of the character below. Again, for each mesh, we apply a Morph Target and multiple Layers.

Here are the final high-poly meshes!

Once I was happy with the high-poly, I had to bake all the layers for each mesh. Afterwards, I decimated all the meshes and exported them. I added the suffix “_high” to each asset before importing to Topogun3. We’ll need to match the naming of the low-poly with the high-poly once we get to the baking process.

Retopology

I used to use Maya’s Quad Draw for my retopology, but importing heavy files can often freeze my session and slow down my progress. So I ended up adopting Topogun 3, a standalone retopology software with an extremely responsive workflow. It’s very similar to Quad Draw, but has additional tools that make the process much faster. I’d direct you to FlippedNormals’ Topogun3 tutorial video if you want to see what it’s capable of.

Retopology and polycount are always a tricky process for beginners, but it ultimately comes down to two questions: how much detail do you need baked into your textures, and does the asset deform? It’s always a process of trial and error when baking your textures from high poly to low poly mesh. I like to try and get away with fewer polygons, only retopologizing to match the silhouette of our mesh, but I will add more if needed. But areas of deformation will always need proper edge-flow and extra polygons in order to deform cleanly. Areas such as finger joints, elbows, knees, and, of course, the face. There are a lot of resources out there that can provide context to these, but I personally like to use Polycount as a reference. 

Below are Tom Parker’s and Nazar Noschenko’s facial topologies. I personally lean towards Tom Parker’s topology, but for our project, I followed Nazar’s a bit closer.

Because of the modular nature of the character’s outfit, it also meant that I had to prioritize the topology of the assets layered on top of each other. For instances like the glove and the hand, I simply took the low-poly mesh of the hand, duplicated it, and wrapped it around the high-poly glove. This ensures that when the hand deforms, the glove deforms without too much clipping (hopefully, none at all!). The pants were also retopologized in a similar workflow. Below are images of the hand and glove low-poly meshes.

The torso is a bit trickier here, but fortunately, most of the deformation is around the abdomen.

UV Sets & Unwrapping

For the unwrapping process, I import all of the low-poly meshes from Topogun3 into Autodesk Maya. I first make sure all the low-poly meshes have the suffix “_low”; this is important for our baking process. I then organize them into separate UV groups. 

I follow a fairly standard process of unwrapping. Try your best to hide the seams in obscure areas of the mesh, sharp edges, or in areas where there are drastic color or material changes. For the shirt, for example, I like to place my UV seams at the garment trimming. This is where the shirt transitions from an almost 90-degree angle. The seams are shown as white edges in the video below:

As for the lizard, the underbelly changes from green scales to a soft pink underbelly. The border between these two colors is where I placed the seams. For this to work, though, you have to keep UV unwrapping in mind during the retopology process. 

For organic and symmetrical UV islands like the Lizard’s body, I use Straighten Shell on the centerline and then Unfold the rest. I try not to distort the edge seams from their natural positions when unfolded, only keeping the centerline of each UV (if symmetrical) completely straight. 

When dealing with mirrored meshes like the lizard’s wings and limbs, I like to move the mirrored UV island to the adjacent UV space. This will save us texel density, allowing for higher texture resolution. Speaking of texel density, I try to keep it at a uniform value across the entire project, with a few exceptions, such as the face.

For the bags and belts, I use the same procedure, but I tend to straighten at least two edges for each UV island and unfold everything in between. The straight edges allow me to neatly organize the UV islands when using the Layout UV tool.

When all the mesh UVs are done and organized into their material groups, I can finally arrange them in the UV space. I like to use the following settings for my Layout UV tool:

I often select all the large UV islands first and apply the Layout UV tool to automatically organize them in the UV space. Afterwards, I take the Texel Density of these large UV islands and apply them to the smaller UVs. The smaller UVs are then placed within the UV space manually.

Baking

Normally, I would use Marmoset Toolbag for the baking process, but I find that Substance 3D Painter’s more recent updates with baking work well. Once the low poly is complete, I make sure all meshes are properly named. All low-poly meshes will have the suffix “_low”, whereas all high-poly meshes will have the suffix “_high”. This will allow Substance 3D Painter to identify matching geometry and properly bake our textures down from the high-poly to the low-poly. As for the settings I use, I generally crank up everything. See image below:

Texturing

Huuuuge disclaimer: I am not very skilled with hand-painting. I understand the fundamentals, but I’m mainly a stylized PBR kind of guy. Fortunately for me, Substance 3D Painter recently released this new filter called Stylization. For this tutorial, I’ll go through how I textured the lizard companion utilizing this new feature, as the same workflow can be applied to the rest of the project. 

But before I start texturing, I like to do a few preparations, like create my Anchors. These Anchors are the foundations of all my textures and are used to expedite a lot of my workflow.

Base Color Mask Anchor Setup

This anchor will act as a Mask for our base colors. It consists of a Baked Lighting Stylized filter, an Ambient Occlusion Generator, and a Curvature Generator. Here's how I set it up:

Once your Base Color Mask is done, place an Anchor at the top. With just the Base Color visible in the viewport, the layer should look like this:

These are essentially our “gray values” if we were hand-painting using a grayscale workflow. Try tweaking the settings to your needs!

Gradient Mask Anchor Setup

In my opinion, color gradients are one of the main pillars of stylized art, so it’s important to get your gradients set up precisely to your needs. My mentor from Think Tank Online, Philipp Neumann, taught me this cool trick you can do in Autodesk Maya to generate custom Gradient Masks. It’s a bit long to explain here, so I’ll include it in a video below. Essentially, we create a new material for our UV set and apply a black to white Color Ramp projection and then bake this material directly onto our UV texture set. The result is a gradient mask positioned specifically for each mesh in the UV group. We then export this texture from Maya and import it into Substance 3D Painter for our Gradient Mask Anchor. In the video below, I go over how I create this Gradient Mask.

Back in Substance 3D Painter, create a new Fill Layer and activate only the Color channel. Click “Base color” and find our imported Gradient texture and select it. Finally, apply a Blur filter and Anchor to our Layer. With just the Base Color visible in the viewport, the Gradient Mask layer should look like this:

I like to save these anchors into a Smart Material folder and reuse them for other texture sets. Doing so allows us to maintain a uniform texture design throughout our project. Just remember to swap out the Gradient Mask for the one that matches your new texture set. For now, we’ll hide both of these anchor layers as we only need them as masks. Now on to texturing!

Base Color

I start by creating a Fill Layer and isolating just the color channel. I then set the “Base Color” of the material to our Base Color Mask anchor. Afterwards, we add a Gradient filter to the layer, and if we like, we can color-pick from our concept. See image below:

I fill out the base color for all the meshes using this method. For the Lizard in particular, it has separate color values for its limbs, wings, belly, head, spikes, and fangs. So we’ll have to create separate Base Color layers for each of these and apply masks to isolate them as well. 

For the eyes, I simply created a Fill Layer for the sclera and drew in the iris and pupil using separate Paint Layers. Here’s a quick timelapse of all the base color layers applied:

Gradients

Once all the base color layers are completed, we move on to the gradients! Similar to the Base Color layers, we’ll be referencing our Gradient Mask anchor here, and we’ll also be creating separate masked folders for each element of our Lizard. Within each folder, we’ll be placing two HSL layers referencing our gradient mask anchor. One HSL layer with the original gradient mask and another HSL layer but with an inverted gradient mask.

We’ll then adjust the HSL parameters to meet our needs. The “Top” gradient will be brighter and warmer in color. Whereas, the “Bottom” gradient will be darker and colder in color. But for our Lizard here, we made the color colder at the top and warmer at the bottom. I wanted to use the opposite coloring scheme for a cold-blooded animal.

Feel free to adjust the Hue levels to exotic colors too, perhaps use complementary colors to add drastic color changes! And don’t forget you can always hand-paint some of the Gradients here as well. I actually ended up editing the gradient for the main body of the lizard, as it was too dark around the tail.

And at the top of our gradients, I like to add a Roughness/Metalness Fill Layer. This will mainly contribute to our base roughness and metalness values. We’ll add some breakup to this later on.

Material/Texture Breakup

For the texture breakup, I like to start with some BnW Spot textures using our Gradient mask. Similar to our HSL gradients, I like to use two BnW spot textures: One texture using the original gradient mask and another texture using the inverted gradient mask. Feel free to swap out the textures with something else, like Cloud or Grunge textures, to break up the colors, whatever works for you. At this point, I also begin breaking up the roughness and metalness, but for our Lizard, we’ll have to set metalness to 0 at all times. I will also liberally apply Blur Slope on all our layers here. This is how I set them up: 

Next, I like to add an Ambient Occlusion layer and a Curvature layer to darken some more areas and apply additional Roughness. Again, we’ll apply Blur Slope to these layers.

And finally, we’ll add a Cavity layer to make our sculpted details a bit darker, but mainly the cavities of the ribbed scales on its back and limbs. If this were the pauldron or book, it would make any surface imperfections like scratches or slashes more visible. We’ll also add a Sharpen layer to make our textures “pop” a bit more.

Stylization Filter

The way the Stylization filter works is that it takes all the underlying information in our project, all the baked maps, and all the layers below the Stylization layer, samples them, and applies a custom filter. All those Blur Slopes that we applied earlier will provide additional colors for the Stylization filter’s brush strokes now. Therefore, it’s crucial to place this filter near or at the top of our layers. For our purposes, we won’t be putting it at the very top, as we still need to add the inking layer. 

The default preset for the Hand-Paint Stylization filter adds Baked Lighting and creates large and distinct brush strokes. But my goal here is to generate natural and subtle brush strokes without creating additional effects on our model. With a bit of experimentation, here are the settings I used. 

Strokes Amount: I found that decreasing the amount of strokes made it “less messy” looking and more deliberate.

Strokes Select: I’m not entirely sure what it does here, but I picked the “Strokes” option. It just looked better than the default “Waves” pattern.

Strokes Scale: The smaller the strokes, the cleaner the appearance. I found that the larger strokes would sometimes appear like “mistakes” on the canvas and I wanted something clean(er).

Color Variation: Lowering the color variation meant the filter would sample fewer colors in the surrounding area, which lowered the “randomness” of the colors.

Roughness Variation: I wanted a little variation in the roughness where the color changed.

Scales

The scales were easy to do. I used “Kyle’s Concept Brushes – Dragon Scales”, a brush that already comes with Substance 3D Painter. It’s a fairly cartoon-ish looking brush, so I thought it would go great with the Lizard’s design. For the scale layer, I simply used a dark green color with the height, roughness, and metalness channels. Metalness is set to 0, and the layer is placed above the Stylization filter.

Inking

The inking on the character was initially done with a Curvature generator. I fine-tuned it a bit, but I was never satisfied with the look. So I ended up hand-drawing a lot of the ink. They’re just basic paint layers in black. The brush doesn’t really matter here, in my opinion; just pick whatever you like. If you like, you can use a Curvature generator as a guide for your inking; it definitely helped me pinpoint areas of interest. Make sure to place the inking layer at the very top! Here’s a quick video of me drawing the ink on the head:

And we’re done!

Exporting the Textures

When rendering in Marmoset Toolbag, I like to use the “PBR Metallic Roughness” template. These are the settings I use:

Cartoon Outline/Inverted Shell Method: 

To achieve the look of a black cartoon-ish outline, we’ll need to go back to Autodesk Maya. I took our existing character, in our case, the Lizard, and duplicated it. I then combined it all into a single mesh, pushed all vertices in the Local +Z direction, and then reversed the normals. I then applied a new material called “Outline_mat” with the color set to black.

Lighting & Rendering

After a lot of back and forth, I ultimately used Marmoset Toolbag for the final renders. I did try rendering in Unreal Engine 5 again, but the rendering and camera systems in Marmoset are just so much easier to use.

Texture Setup

Marmoset Toolbag’s material setup is a simple drag-and-drop system. We use a standard material setup using a Normal Map, Albedo, Roughness, Metalness, and Emissives. But we also apply a Subsurface Scattering for the thinner meshes of the Lizard, such as the wings.

Cartoon Outline Setup

When creating the cartoon outline, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. This method is a very expensive shortcut to creating a cartoon outline. We are essentially doubling our polycount as we are duplicating the mesh. There’s no other way around this in Marmoset Toolbag. Unfortunately, we cannot create a custom shader like we could in UE5. We also need to make sure that both the original mesh and the duplicated outline mesh are not transformed from their original positions, and keep them exactly where they are. Also, Marmoset Toolbag does not like rendering reversed normals when RayTracing is activated. It will completely black out a mesh if the normals are reversed, unable to see the original mesh within. A workaround for this is to disable “Cast Shadows” from your outline mesh. Below, I show how I set up my textures and the cartoon outline for the Lizard:

Camera Settings

All my cameras have these settings. I tend to keep the Lens in Perspective Mode with a Field of View around 15°. It’s almost orthogonal but still shows a bit of depth. We don’t want a flat image, nor do we want that “fish-eyed” effect either! I also like to tweak the settings around once I finish setting up the lighting.

Sky Light

I tend to drop the value down to around 0.5 or lower. Ultimately, the light from the Sky Light isn’t too important; we only really need it for its backdrop. This particular one is called “Cave Entry Forest”. I set the mode to Blurred Sky, which gives us a nice, varied green background that we can play with by rotating it.

Three-Point Lighting

I initially used a standard three-point lighting system with a Sky light, but eventually added more lights to emphasize certain areas of the pose.

Podium

The green patch of grass is a texture I picked up from N-Hance Studio on ArtStation. In Maya, I created a cylinder with bevelled edges for the podium. Then, in Substance 3D Painter, I simply created an Opacity mask to represent where I want the texture to appear. Then, in Marmoset, I applied both the textures and the opacity map to achieve our final result.

Rendering Settings

For our rendering settings, I activated Ray-Tracing and used the following settings. To get the most out of my textures, I like to render my images in 3840x3840 and my videos in 1440p.

Conclusion

From start to finish, the entire project took about 3 months or so. The blockout took a couple of days, while the mid to high poly passes took about 2 weeks. And somewhere around 2 weeks on the retopology and UVs as well.

Because there was a lot of experimentation and trial and error, texturing took me about 2-3 weeks. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do with the texturing. I knew I wanted to try hand-painting, but I was never good at it. So I ended up looking for tutorials online and practicing on different layers in Substance 3D Painter, which took a lot of my time. And eventually, I started experimenting with Substance 3D Painter’s new Stylization filter.

Compositing and rendering took a bit longer than I had expected. I couldn’t decide whether to use Unreal Engine 5 again or take the easy route and just render in Marmoset Toolbag 5, so I initially used both. In the end, I decided to use Marmoset Toolbag for my final renders. Compositing and rendering the images and stitching together the video probably took about two weeks in total. In the essence of saving time (and headaches), be decisive and plan! 

From my experience, my advice for beginner artists would be to pinpoint exactly what you want to learn and focus all your energy on that. I’m a massive gamer, and I like to optimize builds, strategies, and actions wherever I can. My mistake was thinking I could go into Blender and learn everything all at once, from modelling, sculpting, texturing, Shader/Geometry nodes, and of course, rendering. You’ll only feel overwhelmed, lost, and exhausted. Instead, find something that can take hold of your interest for long periods of time and maximize your knowledge and skills on that subject. Become obsessed and optimize your build. And when you feel you’ve hit a wall in your studies, don’t be afraid to take a step back and try a different approach, and seek advice from other artists. Use resources wherever you can find them, whether on YouTube, Twitter, ArtStation, and, of course, here at 80 Level! In this article alone, I probably cited a dozen other artists and resources. The knowledge you seek is most likely out there already; you only need to reach out!

Ken C, 3D Stylized Character and Prop Artist