Creating a Cyberpunk Character in ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, and UE5

Introduction

Hello, my name is Mohammad Asraf, I’m a 3D Character Artist from Kathmandu, Nepal, and I’m currently working as a Freelance Character Artist for Keos Masons. I’ve been freelancing for them for almost 5 years now and worked on projects like Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, Horizon Forbidden West, Gotham Knights, PUBG New State, Outlast Trials and a few unannounced ones. 

In the case of Project Hypolita, I found this fantastic design by Rodrigo Idalino and set two key objectives. First and foremost, I wanted to optimize and speed up my Hardsurface workflow by using only ZBrush to create all the Hard Surface parts. As for the second objective, I wanted to use Unreal Engine to render the character. 

References

I was inspired by titles such as the Halo series, Mass Effect Andromeda, the Crysis series, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk, the Guardians of the Galaxy game, Iron Man movies and amazing artworks made by artists like Mike Andrew Nash, Marco Plouffe, Cedric Seaut, Frederic Daoust, Patrick van Rooijen and Georg Uebler, just to name a few individuals whose work resonated with me.

Modeling

I began by blocking out Angela's anatomy with Base Mesh Bundle from Vincent Ménier and then adjusted the anatomy to be more athletic, taller, and muscular to meet the body type I wanted for Angela. The main aim was to focus on the anatomical silhouettes of the body, forms, and shapes rather than the details because the suit would cover the entire body. When I'm satisfied with the body, I move on to blocking out the suit. 

The suit's blockout is entirely made with DynaMesh. Using multiple Polygroups and SubTools, or occasionally in a single mesh. This is when Polypaint comes in handy to visualize the design concept early on. Also, during the blockout, there is no need to be really clean with all the pieces. For example, the neck plate bottom is not too clean because it is hidden when everything is put together.

After I am satisfied with the overall blockout of the suit, I will begin polishing each plate to make it look clean with subdivisions, proper bevels, thickness, and so on. This is the most time-intensive stage, so I recommend going slowly and steadily and analyzing a lot of references. After all the Hard Surface parts have been polished, it is time to detail. 

Face Sculpt

The major thing I do before sculpting a face is set up my ZBrush scene so I can sculpt with proper perspective and match references better. I took the Basemesh from Georgian Avasilcutei and created my scene as follows:

There are three major steps: 

• focusing mainly on simple forms, proportions, and larger forms defining bones and muscles.
• asymmetry, fat pads, and unique characteristics.
• mostly pores and minute features. 

Also, because you will be continually fixing big shapes and forms even when tackling pores, I consider these stages to be a loop rather than a linear path to follow. So it's never an absolute rule that you cannot fix large forms when making pores. Layers are also quite helpful for multiple iterations.

I utilized XYZ Maps and ScanStore heads for the pore details. Here's how I went about doing the low poly for the face with MetaHuman assets. I used a method I learnt while working on the Gotham Knights project for the facial textures, so all credit goes to the wonderful artist there. I just tweaked it a little to my liking. The fundamental idea is to construct the skin under layers and then overlay a face Albedo Map on top, which can be any Albedo, XYZ, or MetaHuman one. 

Here's how the layers are made up in Substance 3D Painter for that:

And because I wrapped the MetaHuman model around my sculpt, all the UVs and textures match, thus the Shader is similar. 

Hair cards can be a frustrating and time-consuming stage, which has frequently put me off completing them, but I tried to make my process optimum this time by doing a lot of planning and organization, thanks to Sushan Mahandhar for all the ideas and suggestions during the process. So, when it comes to creating hair cards, planning is essential. Here's how I accomplished mine. 

Also, because hair is an iterative process, it is always beneficial to create it in a way that allows all the alterations when needed. I did numerous iterations, testing it continuously in Unreal Engine, adjusting the volumes in ZBrush.

The Hair shader is then set up using Paragon shader, which is free to download and use. I just changed their maps with mine, and all the maps were easily baked inside Coiffure. Just be sure to experiment with the PixelDepthOffset settings if you have any strange problems with the hair.

UVs

One thing I would recommend is to create shortcuts for all the repeated tasks and tools used during retopology, such as cut, weld, bridge, collapse, loop, and so on, to make the process much faster. This is how I tackled most of the suit's retopology and UVs: 

Baking and Texturing 

To bake all of my assets, I utilized Marmoset Toolbag 4. If you match the naming for your high and low poly meshes, for example, armour_high and armour_low, and use the Quick Loader to load the meshes, Marmoset Toolbag 4 will also automatically organize your mesh. 

For the suit's textures, I designed all of my ID maps so I could instance the textures throughout all of my texture sets and only emissive and some dirt maps are unique. I also have my Tonal map set to ACES to match my Unreal Engine scene. 

Here are the layers created using Substance 3D Painter. My major goal was to have a lot of contrast in terms of color and roughness so that each element could stand out.

Posing

Because I don't know much about rigging, all the poses were created in ZBrush Tpose Master. For this project, I created four postures that were influenced by different things.

Pose A: I was influenced by studio photographs.

Pose B:  I was influenced by superhero flying postures.

Pose C: I was influenced by Overwatch, particularly this one

Pose D: I was influenced by a back shot image from a superhero movie.

Rendering and Lighting

I rendered with UE5. I used the Epic MetaHuman Scene as a starting point but personalized it to fit my scene. I begin by importing a cylinder from 3ds Max into UE. I subdivide the cylinder 2-3 times and invert the normals.

Nothing special for post-processing, just some Bloom and Exposure changes. Just be sure to check the Lumen Gl Final Gather Quality because it might generate these lines when rendering.

I make some color grading with the camera's LUTs because I like working with unique ones rather than global ones. Here are the camera and LUT settings. For the LUTs, I utilized the Amplify LUT set. Finally, I utilized Movie Render Queue to render out all the photos. 

Conclusion

I would tell aspiring artists that this is a long marathon that will take time. The progress is not a linear growth curve and there will be days when they are in the valley of suck. Persistence, patience, and hard work all contribute to your growth. Ask for feedback and learn to accept. Filter that feedback, devote time to your fundamentals, lighting, anatomy, composition,. Spend time learning good topology, efficient faster workflows for the technical stages like retopo, UVs, and bakes because character art is never 100% sculpting, it includes many other technical things, and don't forget about your physical and mental health.

In the end, I worked on the project on and off for nearly a year, trying out new ideas and redoing old ones. Because of my work and personal life, I had to go weeks without touching it, and finding the inspiration and interest to continue during the project's valley of suck periods was the most tough personal hurdle. However, it feels amazing to finally upload a personal creation after such a lengthy period. 

I'd like to thank Marianna Liubimova, Gabriele Floris, Ventsislav Nachev, Jonathan Riley, and Michael Sydoriadis for their constructive feedback, Patrick van Rooijen and KeosMasons on Twitch for all the hard surface workflow ideas, as well as everyone on these Discord servers: Donpolygon server, Baidukova's class, and the CharacterArt server, to name a few. Thank you guys for the interview opportunity. I hope this breakdown is helpful.

Mohammad Asraf, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie