Creating The Witcher-Inspired Semi-Realistic Character with ZBrush

Introduction

Hello! My name is Alexa Ranzola, also known as “tetrabrush” online, and I am a 3D Character Artist from the United States. My artistic skills stem from a traditional background in oil painting and sketching, but I always desired to enter a creative industry that mixed my affinity for technology and visual arts. I entered college to learn 3D animation, but during my studies, I discovered that my true calling was for real-time video game characters. I later enrolled in a character art program at Think Tank Training Centre, where I accelerated my growth into this path. “Cleric of the Sun” is the mentorship project that I completed under the guidance of Magno Coutinho, who pushed me to gain a full understanding of each aspect in the real-time character pipeline.

Inspiration & References

For this project, I knew that I wanted to use a concept in a fantasy aesthetic, and I found this work on ArtStation, created by LUOLIN, that fit exactly what I was looking for. It was a fun challenge to translate a stylized concept into my own artistic direction, maintaining exaggerated and strong shapes while utilizing realistic textures.

I was inspired primarily by the series of The Witcher, Game of Thrones, and Diablo to find the balance of what I wanted out of this project. The concept displays a tall and intimidating man, yet his clothing, scars, and books tell another story. He is not a ruthless barbarian or knight covered completely in armor, but someone who possesses magical/scholarly skills while being an adept fighter. He has sun motifs on his armor in contrast to a pale, almost undead complexion with a shining eye. This is where I drew inspiration from characters such as Geralt of Rivia (from both the games and Netflix series) for their strong expressions and multi-layered visual storytelling.

I gathered references in a PureRef document and chose one main reference point for each component, adding more as needed. Once I felt good with the reference board, I went on to develop the character whom my friends have affectionately named “Sorin.”

Modeling

Head

My favorite part of the sculpting process was the head and face. I used Henry Cavill as a starting point for his strong and masculine features, but I wanted to avoid a pure likeness to him and create a unique facial structure that suits the concept. Using famous actors as references is efficient because you can typically find facial molds of them from various film projects, and this helped me gain a good starting point.

I focused on carving out the planes and exaggerating features, aligning with the direction I wanted, and breaking symmetry on features that I felt needed distinction. Since I’m pulling from a stylized concept, it was important for me to not get carried away when exaggerating the forms; I had to round out some edges when translating the style in order to preserve a semblance of realism. I sculpted the skin details by hand, primarily using JHills’s Skin Details brush kit.

Hair

Regarding the hair, I wanted to make it rough but still a bit put together, with a lot of layers, choppy sections, and loose hairs. I made a basic sculpt in ZBrush and brought it into Maya for hair card placement using the GS Curve Tools plugin.

To make the curves, I used an old-school trick that a previous teacher showed me. UVs are necessary for this, so on the decimated sculpt I used the Automatic unwrap tool in the UV Editor (it doesn’t have to be pretty!) I then made the mesh Paintable and drew strokes along the forms using the Paint Effects Tool (both under the “generate” menu). I then converted the paint strokes to curves and rebuilt them/smoothed them out. This gave me a great starting point and allowed me to easily build the structures as you can convert multiple curves at once.

I rendered the textures using Fibershop, making variations for different sections of the hair. Then, I named each section of the cards (based on the texture used) to keep it organized and easier to work with. This workflow allows me to change aspects of the hair efficiently without changing the entirety of other card sections. I used the same process for the eyelashes, eyebrows, and beard but on a smaller scale. 

Clothes & Weapon

The garments were fun to make, but also a challenging aspect of the project for me. There were many pieces to keep track of, and it was difficult to maintain the stylized shapes that I wanted without sacrificing the realism of the project.

Initially, I attempted to simulate these pieces in Marvelous Designer, but I found it was a better use of my skills to sculpt all of the clothing (scarf, robe, padding, gloves, etc.) except the simulated pants, entirely in ZBrush. I mainly used the Move, Clay Buildup, and Standard brush (with Lazy Step adjusted to 0.05) to sculpt clear and defined forms with direction.

Cloth sculpting can be intimidating at times, but with a lot of refining and guidance from my mentor, I loved the result. I preferred adding details such as stitches and tears during the high-poly phase and refining them later during the texturing process. For the hard-surface elements, I used Polygroups so I could ZRemesh my blockout geometry into a clean surface to work with. I then defined the edges for each distinctive plane; using Polish by Groups and the Move brush (with AccuCurve toggled on) gave me full control of the shape. Then, I extracted Panel Loops from the mesh to add thickness and Creased edges that needed to be sharp.

Retopology & Unwrapping

After decimating the high-poly model, I imported it into Maya, where I retopologized using the Quad Draw tool for every aspect except the head; I instead used Wrap 3D to wrap a base mesh for the head sculpt. Sorin is a larger character with various pieces, but I felt it was important to optimize him without losing quality since he is a portfolio piece. I focused on maintaining the flow of the polygons so that it is efficient and clean. For example, the bandages on the right arm are separate meshes, but I maintained the orientation and flow of the topology along the arm to ensure that it deforms properly when rigged/animated.

Areas where there are multiple smaller pieces on a larger piece (mainly with the armor) are fused into one. When it comes to UVs, organization is king. Separating tiles into sections (one for garments, another for accessories, etc.) saved so much time during the baking/texturing process because I knew where everything was located during testing.

For symmetrical pieces such as the pants, greaves, and boots, the UVs are mirrored and laid on top of each other to save space. These tricks, along with others, such as collapsing edge loops and shrinking unseen UVs, helped me keep the character at 77k tris across 8 UDIM tiles. With the extra space I saved, I decided to shift more polys to the hair to increase visual quality, bumping the project to 132k tris in total.

Texturing

If I were to describe the texturing phase, it would be  “trust the process and Curvature/Cavity Maps are your best friend.”  I baked all of the maps in Marmoset Toolbag and organized my Substance 3D Painter project into a non-destructive workflow using masks and ID maps. Since there are multiple kinds of materials (leather, fabric, metal, skin, etc.) keeping everything clean helped streamline the process and saved me a lot of headaches!

Sking & Eyes

For this project, I didn’t want to rely on a 3D scan for the skin textures because I knew it wasn’t going to give me the exact result I wanted. I wanted Sorin’s skin to be pale and intense, which I knew was going to require a lot of breakups and detail.

Using primarily fill layers with black/white masks, I simplified the skin down into three main categories: zones, surface, and details. The zones highlight the underlying layer of the skin and where the structures of the face (bone, fat, blood vessels, etc.) interact with each other. The surface is where I created the base of the skin; layers of microveins, pores, hair tones, and other aspects live here.

The details category is where everything ties together, focusing on the elements that make the face pop and making necessary adjustments (my favorite part to work on was the veins and dark circles/redness around the eyes). I took this same approach when creating the eyes, utilizing a lot of breakup and manual detail alongside masks and a Normal Map, only for the iris from Texturing XYZ. I created the normal brown eye first and tweaked the colors for the yellow eye. 

Other Materials

I approached these materials by creating a “clean” version first and adding a break-up to demonstrate age and wear. Once I made a good base, I made it into a smart material to be used on multiple pieces (like with the belts) and made distinctions as needed. Procedural textures do a lot of heavy lifting when adding breakup and height details; I used the base grunge and dirt textures available in Substance 3D Painter and used tri-planar projection for this. What helped me a lot in this process was to simplify each layer and not worry about trying to make the textures overcomplicated to the point where it gets “muddy.”

Lighting & Rendering

I love rendering in Marmoset Toolbag because of how streamlined the process is for building lighting structures and mapping cameras. I wanted to keep the presentation for Sorin simple and precise, so I used a three-light setup with two minor lights and a daytime HDRI skylight. I posed him in ZBrush to replicate the concept and have his head look toward the light source, keeping in line with the sun-related theme.

The first light is the largest and illuminates the front, the second light serves as a soft rim light, and the third is narrower and off towards his right so that this side doesn’t get too overshadowed by the main light. The two minor lights help the right hand and weapon catch a bit more visibility in certain shots. I kept post-production effects to a minimum, adding some slight grain and vignettes with subject focus on certain shots. 

Conclusion

It was very important to me that I reinforced my knowledge of the pipeline in order to gain confidence in the areas that I struggle in. The best skill that I took away from this experience was a greater understanding of art direction and design because I had to convert a stylized concept into a realistic character in a way that didn’t remove the charm of the piece. I would recommend that other artists try to do a similar exercise in order to broaden the scope of one’s capabilities.

Alexa Ranzola, 3D Character Artist