Creating a Mesmerizing and Cinematic Real-Time Character Using ZBrush and Unreal Engine 5

#Character Art #Interviews #Unreal Engine #Marvelous Designer #Maya #ZBrush #Substance 3D Painter

Lena Holmfridardottir shared the workflow behind the Lyoba character, discussing how she achieved an anatomically correct sculpt, the tools she used to create the realistic afro hair, and explaining how she used a Use Wet toggle to texture the face.

Introduction

I'm Lena Holmfridardottir, a Character Artist based in Copenhagen. From an early age, I was drawn to character work and started attending life drawing classes and studying anatomy to better understand how to bring characters to life. I initially explored animation, but found myself more drawn to building the characters themselves and focusing on how they look and feel.

I later pursued a degree in computer graphic arts, and eventually moved into game development, drawn to the collaborative nature of long-term projects and the balance between artistic expression and technical constraints. Over the past few years, I've worked across VFX and games, contributing to shipped titles, with my most recent work focusing on stylized characters.

Lyoba is a personal project where I wanted to explore a more realistic direction, taking a 2D concept and translating it into a cinematic character that holds up in real time. The goal was to stay true to the original design while grounding it in believable anatomy, materials, and lighting. This piece was created during Şefki Ibrahim's Hyperreal Character Creation in UE5 course.

The Concept & Inspiration

Lyoba is based on the striking Iyoba 2077 concept by Kkaburi, which reimagines the Queen Mother of the Benin Kingdom in a cyberpunk setting. I was drawn to the contrast of traditional African royal iconography against a futuristic aesthetic. My main objective was "Translation Accuracy": ensuring that the proportions, attitude, and regal presence of the 2D art survived the transition into a high-fidelity 3D space.

The Importance of Reference

For Lyoba, reference gathering was a multi-stage process. I didn't just look for general inspiration. I broke my references down into specific categories:

Anatomy & Likeness: Real-world faces with similar bone structure and heritage to ground the sculpt in reality.
Material Response: Photos of gold and weathered metals to study specular breakup.
Grooming: Afro hair references, focusing on volume, breakup, and variation of the curls.

I used PureRef to keep everything organized on a second monitor. Training your eye to recognize subtle real-world variation is just as important as mastering the tools.

Modeling & The MetaHuman Pipeline

Sculpting: I began in ZBrush, focusing on capturing the likeness and anatomy of the concept.
Wrap: To make the character production-ready, I wrapped a MetaHuman Creator base mesh around my custom sculpt. This provides a high-quality UV layout and immediate facial rig compatibility while preserving my original forms.
Costume & Accessories: The outfit began in Marvelous Designer to establish natural fabric weight and folds. After the simulation, I refined the forms in ZBrush. Retopology in Maya was kept clean and animation-friendly, prioritizing deformation in key areas. For the gold elements, I focused on clean sub-D modeling to ensure sharp, realistic highlights.

Grooming: Building the Afro

Afro hair in real-time is a challenge of volume, silhouette, and controlled randomness. I created the groom in Maya XGen as a single groom, with the overall shape defined early and variation introduced procedurally through modifiers. The curls were primarily shaped within the Clump Modifier, which allowed me to establish the main structure and direction of the hair while maintaining a cohesive silhouette.

To introduce more natural variation, I layered in a Coil Modifier, adding secondary breakup and subtle irregularity to the curl pattern. This helped avoid repetition and gave the hair a more organic feel. Finally, I used a series of Noise Modifiers to introduce flyaways and frizz. These smaller details were essential in breaking up the CG look and softening the overall appearance. The groom was exported as Alembic strands and imported into UE5.6 as a Groom Asset, allowing for realistic light interaction and physics.

Texturing & The "Micro-Wetness" Trick

For the head, I used the MetaHuman texture as a clean foundation, then customized it in Substance 3D Painter with facial markings and tonal variation. Skin Detail: I integrated TexturingXYZ VFace displacement data to introduce micro-pore detail and break up the surface at a finer level.

Within Unreal Engine, I further refined the look using the MetaHuman skin shader, adjusting several of the available material parameters to better control subsurface response, roughness variation, and overall skin breakup. A key takeaway from Şefki's course was using an inverted Curvature map to drive moisture.

In the MetaHuman skin material, I enabled the "Use Wet" toggle and masked the valleys of the pores. Tweaking this in the Material Instance allowed me to simulate natural skin oils, giving the surface a subtle, "breathing" quality and avoiding the overly dry, plastic look often seen in real-time characters.

Lighting & Rendering in UE5.6

My goal was pure real-time fidelity, achieving a cinematic result entirely within the Unreal Engine 5.6 viewport. I did not use the Path Tracer for final renders. What you see is what appears in Lit mode in real time. Materials were first established in a neutral environment using a basic three-point lighting setup, before transitioning into a more cinematic lighting scenario.

Hardware ray tracing was used for reflections and shadows to enhance realism while remaining within real-time constraints. Final renders were captured using Unreal Engine's Movie Render Queue. This approach forces precision. Without relying on offline rendering, Roughness, Specular, and Subsurface Scattering must be carefully balanced. If it works in the viewport, it will hold up in-game.

Conclusion

One of the biggest challenges was groom look-dev, achieving softness in afro hair without it appearing overly "crunchy." This required careful balancing of density, clumping, and material response, with constant iteration in-engine. Another challenge was the shader response on reflective surfaces, particularly the glasses. Small adjustments in Roughness and Reflection intensity had a large impact on believability, requiring multiple passes to keep them grounded without becoming distracting.

A more technical challenge came from the MetaHuman eye setup. Because the eye uses layered meshes, including a wetness shell, even minor geometry edits can cause clipping when brought into MetaHuman Creator.

My advice: Move into the engine earlier than you think. Many issues, especially with hair and shaders, only appear under real-time lighting. Early iteration in Unreal Engine leads to better decisions and less rework. Also, study real-world materials at a micro level. Subtle variation is often what separates something that looks good from something that feels real.

Technical Summary:

Software: ZBrush, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Substance 3D Painter, Unreal Engine 5.6, MetaHuman, XGen, Wrap, and TexturingXYZ.

Final Thoughts:

This project was an opportunity to push further into realistic character work and better understand how different elements, such as groom, materials, and lighting, come together in real time. Seeing everything come together directly in the viewport was a particularly satisfying moment.