Creating a Photorealistic Santa Claus Model With Substance 3D & UE5

What is a Team from Earth?

Team From Earth is a realistic character and environment art production studio for AA and AAA games and animations.

Rather than attempting to be a jack of all trades, we are committed to seeking the perfect synergy between artists' passions and specialization and the demands of the market. Our services:

• Full-body character creation.
• Character props, clothing, and outfits.
• Real-time hair.
• Environmental and hard-surface props.

Established in 2022, we've already been participating in exciting AAA projects, and are open for a few more partnerships in 2024. 

How to Create a 3D Santa Claus Your Kids Will Believe In?

Character design is a powerful tool for conveying emotions and narratives. It's essential to keep the character's personality and the intended vibe in mind during the production process. Through elements like design, shape, color, and other visual cues, you can effectively tell a story and create an emotional connection with the player or user. 

Santa Claus is indeed a symbol of joy and happiness, particularly during the holiday season. The enchanting concept of a magical figure who can visit every home in one night and grant wishes fosters a profound sense of wonder and excitement. When creating a 3D model of Santa Claus, it's crucial to capture and convey this sense of enchantment and wonder to evoke those positive emotions associated with the holiday season.

Here are three fundamental aspects of 3D characters, drawing from our extensive years of experience:

1. Character vibe. Be sure that during the production, the general mood of the character matches the idea behind, it shouldn’t be lost.
2. Quality standards, visually and technically. Think about every character not as a single art piece but as a game element that should match with the environment and other characters.
3. Engine look. During the production, we have to care about not just nice Marmoset renders, but be focused on the final quality in the game engine, which is usually way different from what artists see in other software. So check yourself, exaggerate some shapes and texture elements to achieve a nice final result.

Technical Requirements For Up-To-Date 3D Character Art

Characters are often categorized based on their interaction with the player and how they're presented in the game world. Here's a breakdown of these character categories:

• Hero Character: This character type is the players’ avatar, the one they associate with themselves and spend a lot of time looking at during gameplay and customization in the lobbies. Hero characters have a high polygon count, ranging from 150k to 500k, or even more, if real-time hair is included. Multiple 4k textures may be utilized to achieve the desired level of detail.
• Interactive NPC Character: These characters are the ones players interact with, converse with, or come close to within the game. Visual fidelity for these characters is important because players will engage with them, and they should appear as detailed as Hero characters, especially in games where players can approach them closely. However, the technical requirements for these characters can vary based on the game's genre and how prominently they are featured on the screen (as an example polycount varies from 30k to 150k triangles including hair for MMO RPGs, 200k-500k triangles for the first/third-person shooters)
• Background NPC characters are often part of the crowd or engaged in distant actions. They serve as part of the game's ambiance and typically do not demand strict adherence to design details; requirements are lower. Many elements are reused across these characters with variations in patterns or colors, making production faster and more cost-effective. The production time and costs for different outfits or appearances can vary. 

Santa Claus model was created as a hero character or interactive NPC:

• Classic Santa character (body and outfit) – around 300k triangles, x8 textures
• Vintage Santa character (body and outfit) – around 200k triangles, x8 textures

What Are the Production Speed and Pricing Considerations for 3D Characters in AAA Games?

When considering production speed, here is a rough estimate for a skilled artist if you decide to outsource a high-quality character from Team From Earth similar to Santa Claus:

• Base body, face, and hands: 15 production days
• Real-time hair (both head and facial hair): 7-9 production days
• Outfit: 16-17 production days

How Did the Process With This Character Start?

When envisioning character design to showcase the TFE's capabilities and quality, we aimed for a unique approach. Instead of choosing a standard male avatar, art director wanted to play with unique body shapes and opted for an older face to highlight the team's skill in complex face sculpting. This led to the idea of creating Santa for our portfolio demonstration.

The greatest value lies in being a cohesive team rather than a group of individual artists, as Team from Earth’s projects are a collective effort rather than a collection of individual pieces of work. In the outsourcing business, it's crucial to ensure that a team of 10 artists can deliver assets that seamlessly match the quality and style of a single artist's work.

The Santa Claus project exemplifies this teamwork, with three artists collaborating on a Santa character and two outfits. They shared stylization specifics and worked cohesively. 

Drawing inspiration from vintage Santa Claus illustrations gives us the opportunity to evoke that warm, nostalgic feeling associated with the holidays. In today's world, Santa costumes often lack uniqueness and can feel mass-produced. That's why we're exploring the old-school representation of Santa, aiming to capture the classic, timeless charm and the cozy, traditional holiday magic that sets our character apart.

Now You Can Buy AAA-quality Santa Claus on the Unreal Engine Marketplace

The first challenge was a lack of CG references for Santa Claus that could be used. Of course, we didn’t make anything completely unique in terms of the stylization, but it’s always better if you have the ability to see the existing similar models to be inspired by a good part of them and to avoid mistakes that you don’t like. In our case we couldn't find any nice-looking realistic Santa, so decided to share it with the community if anyone needs it for their game, event, or animation or just for educational purposes. It’s available for purchase now at the Unreal Engine Marketplace and ArtStation.

3D Face and Head Pipeline

No specific face picture was used as a direct reference for our Santa. Instead, we curated a selection of images that captured the desired vibe. The ultimate goal was to create a Santa that we genuinely liked and, more importantly, one that our kids would believe in. We approached the design process following our standard pipeline with likeness requirements. In this article, we will focus on the most challenging part of the process – achieving a great sculpt. 

Generally, there are two ways to start the head: from scratch and from a base mesh. In this case, we used the second option. If you use the DynaMesh tool in Zbrush, it’s important to have good control of the mesh to tweak it more easily, so there should be some retopology after the DynaMesh stage. Also, it’s a good idea to have some UVs.

Sculpting. Primary and secondary shapes

The work is started by sculpting the main forms, followed by secondary details later. There shouldn’t be any work on small details while searching for shapes. Here are a few pieces of advice that could be helpful at this stage of production:

• Don’t use the default focal distance, as it produces a distortion that is not natural for a face; 85-110 is a good range.
• Use subdivision levels for easy edits.
• Constantly change camera angles to view how shapes work from different perspectives.
• Zoom out. This is a great, well-known helper; shapes should have a good read from a distance.
• Change the light direction. It can give you a fresh look at the model.
• Keep in mind that ZBrush materials are different from the ones that are used in the texture or render stage, especially with the skin and its properties, like subsurface scattering, which will affect some detalization. That’s why small details like pores should be a bit more intense, so they can be properly seen in later stages.
• Put some facial hair in place like brows and eyelashes, it will help in reading the form and likeness.

Sculpting. Smaller details

At a certain stage, once we've established the correct direction for the primary and secondary forms, it's time to incorporate smaller details. We utilized various head scans and ZWrap to generate multiple displacement levels, blending them while preserving intricate details on separate layers.

It's a kind of multi-layer sandwich, structured something like this (from bottom to top):

1. A couple of basic surface noises to alleviate the flatness of the surface (should be subtle on the female heads).
2. A group of scan displacement projections, blended afterward.
3. Layers with sculpting and tweaking on top.

During the second group of layers, we can create a rough color texture. Color has a heavy influence on appearance and perception, so having some representation of it earlier will give you a more expected result at the end. This method requires to have some retopology on the head, plus the UVs:

1. Head topology can be taken from the scan, from base mesh, or done by hand
2. Bake can be done directly in ZBrush from the highest subdivision level to the lowest
3. Load the mesh with the bake into Substance 3D Painter and make a rough color texture.
4. Load it back in ZBrush as a texture and continue with a 3rd group of layers, adjusting and finalizing the head.

After this, the process will go as usual by creating new or adjusted low poly that matches technical requirements, baking, and final texturing.

Texturing the Head

To craft a realistic head texture, it's crucial to consider the color variations present in our skin. The skin exhibits a diverse hue range, including shades of blue, red, yellow, and magenta. This variation depends on factors such as the specific head zone, age, gender, and the surrounding environment. Additionally, since our skin is partly translucent, veins and capillaries may be visible. To achieve authenticity, it's recommended to find high-quality references and thoroughly explore them.

Real-Time Hair

For creating hair textures, we used XGen in Maya. The placement of hair cards was facilitated by the excellent GS CurveTools plug-in. This plugin enhances Maya's curve modification toolset, allowing us to create hair cards on the fly, and it's mostly non-destructive, which is fantastic for this kind of work.

When it comes to placing cards, it's more efficient to do it with layers, such as:

1. A base layer that is mostly opaque and covers the skull, preventing us from seeing the skin.
2. A layer with the main hair flow direction; this layer defines most of the forms.
3. A layer with flyaway hairs, acting as the cherry on top to enhance the overall look.

Helpful hints:

• When placing cards, think of them as strands. Instead of using each hair card separately, it's better to combine them into groups that create hair strands following the flow. This approach provides a more realistic look.
• Start your hair placement from the strands located below, following a roof tile principle. This way, you'll have clearer control.
• Avoid hair card intersections as they can cause unpleasant artifacts.
• Focus on the hairline transition; it should be smooth for a realistic appearance.

The whole process requires patience, so take your time. It might not look perfect from the start. Good file and layer organization are essential to avoid getting overwhelmed while tweaking thousands of cards.

Character Outfit

To showcase our approach to textiles, we’d like to walk you through the Vintage outfit creation and some challenges that were faced.

Reference board

The very first stage of any 3D asset production is to plan the work, assemble questions regarding the concept, gather references, and be ready to start. The perfect reference board consists of:

• References for the complex elements for modeling, that are not obvious, find images or pictures of additional angles of similar elements
• References for the materials from the real world
• CG quality references of similar stylization
• CG sculpts and folds

But, as mentioned earlier, creating a realistic 3D model for Santa Claus faced a challenge as there were no great models available on the internet. We hope that our outcome will raise the standards of digital Santa Clauses, and we anticipate seeing more great models by next Christmas.

Marvelous Designer simulation

While the shirt and pants have simple patterns, Santa's extra weight required us to experiment with the shape of the fabric pieces to achieve realistic folds that look good and meet the rig requirements.

Usually, we simulate the entire outfit in one scene to understand the interaction between clothing pieces, so we added suspenders during the Marvelous Designer stage to ensure the fabric would react realistically. In the realistic 3D clothing creation process we aim to achieve about 80% of the final quality in Marvelous Designer. 

Final HP in ZBrush

When the simulation result was good enough, the model was exported to ZBrush to clean up the mesh and give it some thickness. During this transition, you may notice some differences in how the model looks in ZBrush compared to Marvelous Designer due to variations in shaders and viewport settings between the two programs. You may need to make some adjustments in Marvelous Designer until the model looks good in ZBrush.

After cleaning up the mesh, we add thickness to mimic real-life fabrics. This process increases the polygon count in the scene so to make the ZBrush file a bit lighter we recommend removing the backsides of the fabric that won't be visible. Once the model is optimized, it's ready for detailing. 

Elements such as stitching, seams, memory folds, and minor wear and tear are incorporated only after the folds are approved. The micro-detailed texture of the fabric wasn't added at the high-poly stage; it was done during the texture stage. To craft stitching along seams, we employ brushes with alphas, as demonstrated in the GIF below:

LP, UV, and Bake

The next steps – the low-poly, UVs, and baking maps – are pretty standard. For this particular model, the shirt presented the biggest challenge with its numerous folds. When retopologizing elements like this, it's important to avoid non-planar polygons, which can be identified using Maya's CleanUp tool.

Here are basic technical requirements that we use at Team from Earth that should help to avoid common mistakes:

LP

• Meeting the required polycount is a must.
• The flow of edges of the separate objects should follow the main body edges.

UV

• Avoid stretching.
• The seams on UV should be logically placed in the most hidden areas.
• Cut UV along fabric seams.
• UV has to be unwrapped, efficiently packed, and use maximum space but don’t forget about padding.
• Cylindrical parts can be straightened into rectangles for easy layout of UV parts and texturing in the future, especially if you are going to apply a pattern to the texture.
• Small parts can be enlarged. Faces and eyes can also often be enlarged.
• You should check that texel density is the same, especially on the objects placed close to each other.
• If the project uses overlapped UVs, you should move mirrored shells by 1 UV space to the right.
• Check UV direction with a checker map.

Bake

• Correctly name your HP and LP meshes. Example: belt_hp and belt_lp
• Sort the same materials by color in Zbrush for correct ID card baking.
• Triangulate LP for export.
• Carefully review baking for triangulation bugs, appropriate cage thickness, etc.

Textures

Depending on the project requirements, the character textures could have either a clean appearance or be dirtied up with additional wear and tear, stains, and more. In this case, we aimed for a relatively clean look to be sure that Santa looks attractive.

There is an important step in texturing that shouldn't be skipped – finding the right references to understand the desired level of detail.

The pipeline for textile texturing is the following:

1. Basic color. Firstly apply colors from the concept, set up materials, fabric textures, basic metalness, and roughness. Blend different colors and work with generators and masks.
2. Detalization. Work from big details to small. Draw accents, a sense of composition within a single asset. Always try to avoid rushing to add dirt and dust to the model. It's better to do this at the end when the base material looks good and interesting.
3. Stitching for the seams. We use Substance 3D Painter's standard brush.
4. Engine check and adjustments. An important suggestion also is to regularly export the textures to the game engine to see how the material looks there. A lot of elements are lost in engine shaders, so could be exaggerated during texturing to look good. 

We work with each channel individually, switching between Color, Roughness, and Normal channels to ensure that each channel provides the right information for the material properties:

• Roughness of the model should not be flat; add variations and contrast. Different types of materials should have different levels of roughness.
• Contrast should be shown not only in the base color but in the roughness channel as well.
• Create a variety of colors within each material.

Maintaining a well-organized folder hierarchy and naming conventions is crucial to be sure that the art director or any other artist can understand your file and make changes faster if needed.

Setting up materials for Unreal Engine 5

To ensure that we create game-ready models, not just visually appealing art pieces, at Team From Earth, we test all assets in the engine or viewer before submission. For these Santa models, we exported them into Unreal Engine 5. It’s a user-friendly engine for setting up materials and basic shaders to achieve a visually pleasing result. If you have never tried viewing the work in any engine, we strongly suggest starting as it's a must-have to understand how texture maps truly work. We recommend beginning with Unreal; even artists with limited engine experience can easily dive into it.

Unreal has a built-in shader node editor that is capable of creating a vast variety of materials for any task, it’s intuitive to use especially if you are creating something not too complicated. In our case, we used it to create a flexible shader that can modify hair color in various ways.

To achieve a good-looking fabric, we also added some parameters to the clothing in the engine. And here is another advantage of Unreal is its support for users and the provision of useful documentation. In our case, we utilized guidelines on implementing Fresnel in materials. However, when seeking information about the engine, be cautious – it's constantly developing and upgrading. Make sure you find solutions tailored to the specific version you're using.

Fur

While the beard and hair were placed by hand, we tried to optimize this process for the fur, since it's not a focal point of a character and by itself is less unique compared to hair. In this case, we were using Blender’s particle system in the hair mode by following this pipeline:

• Emmit Hair particles from the fur bases
• Create some force fields like vortex and force to create a general direction for hair
• Convert Hair particles to Curves
• Use comb tools to shape hair more naturally
• Convert Curves (hair curves) to Curve
• Use geometry extrude to create future hair cards
• Tilt curves for a desired angle
• Convert to mesh, adjust UV to fill texture

It saved us around 2-3 days of work compared to hand-placing haircards. Such cards generator could be done through other tools, but we found that Blender’s particle system is more user-friendly and faster for such tasks. 

Rendering and Lighting

Creating appealing renders is important for showcasing your portfolio, whether you're selling assets on a marketplace or presenting your work to a team, employer, or client. In a visually-oriented world, we're accustomed to perceiving beautiful images, and we can't overstate the significance of achieving high-quality, quickly-produced render results.

Render is basically a photoshoot of your character, so to have a better render, we need to research how it’s done in real-life scenarios. If you are using Marmoset for it, we recommend switching the tone mapping of your camera to ACES, it gives a richer color range, and an overall more realistic look. 

First of all our character should have a floor, unless we are creating a Space Santa, which is kinda possible if you think about it. The earth version of Santa should have some ground. If you search for some photo studios, it also has a wall behind. We need those surfaces so the light can bounce off it and light up parts of the character. 

After that, we need to create light sources. There are a lot of light position variants you can find online, it’s all about what mood you want to give to your character. Some of them are more dramatic, some are more natural. In our case, we use some basic lighting:

• Key light (main source) to light up the whole piece.
• Fill light (less intense light, softer) to light up shadowy areas caused by key light.
• Rim lights (that are hitting the back) to have some outline of the silhouette and make the character pop from the background.
• Environment light (sky) we tend to keep it low, so it doesn't have a lot of influence on the light, just to brighten some dark shadows.

It’s better to render in 16-bit PSD, especially if you plan to make additional adjustments in Photoshop, for example. Experiment at this stage; test your work from a distance as usual. The character's idea should be easily discernible from afar. Try viewing it on various devices, such as your phone, as each monitor is slightly different, and not all of them are color-calibrated.

Remember to enjoy your work, this is an important goal!

Team From Earth

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev