How to Create a Realistic Female Fantasy Adventurer in Unreal Engine 5

Introduction

I'm Andres Zambrano, a 3D Character Artist with a focus on realistic and semi-realistic game characters. I started practicing 3D around 2012 when I was finishing high school, since I always liked drawing video games and film growing up. I started following tutorials and doing practice characters at around that time.

I remember the first ZBrush course I took was from Ryan Kingslien, and it was about learning the different ZBrush tools and learning anatomy by making a zombie. From there on, I've been integrating different tools like Substance 3D Painter, Maya, Marvelous Designer, Unreal Engine, etc, mainly by watching many different YouTube videos about them.

Fantasy Adventurer

I first started working on it because I wanted to practice making a character design of my own instead of fan art. I wanted to try something similar in design to some of my previous character models, but not as dark in tone. I wanted to create a female character that looked more human and normal than the Lady Maria model I made previously, as well as being free to design and add the ornamentation and details that I wanted. Finally, I wanted to practice with the Unreal Engine instead of Maya, and make the presentation look as close as possible to an offline render like Arnold.

Modeling

For the modeling process, I made an anatomical base mesh with full skin detail that can be reused for different projects. I sculpted the head separately from that base mesh, looking at many different references and adapting it to what I liked, then re-projected the topology and skin details from the anatomical model.

The eyes are the ones from the MetaHuman project, and I just edited the settings to make them look how I wanted. The hair was created in XGen, the same as I would for a character to be rendered in Maya, and then I exported the Alembic files for the hair as a groom. I had to keep different versions of the guides so I could apply them to the different poses, since the hair also needs to be posed when the character looks like she's moving.

The armor and jewelry were created by extracting shapes from the base mesh for each of these objects, then sculpting each individual part so I could control each figure/ornament individually, and finally, I would weld everything together. I would make the pieces as separate ZBrush tools since they could have a lot of parts, and once I was finished with them, I would bring them into the main ZBrush scene and place them on the character.

This workflow is not about saving time. It was about making everything feel handmade, but I did save some time by reusing some buckles and ornaments on the back of the character. The main time-saving tools were used during texturing.

Topology

For the head and hands, I used the topology from the base mesh I made, with a tool called ZWrap to get that topology onto the new head and hands I made for this character. For the more complex areas, I used ZRemesher with polygroups to allow me to control topology and seams for the UVs.

Areas like the shirt and pants that needed to deform really well required that I do it by hand, and then I subdivided them once to get a nice resolution on them. The character is not optimized for a game. It was made for a presentation in Unreal Engine since I wanted to focus on how to make characters look nice in Unreal Engine first. I used Maya for Unwrapping and doing retopology for some areas, and for the more automated parts, I used ZBrush's tools like ZRemesher and UVMaster.

Texturing

For texturing, I used Substance 3D Painter as always. I divided the model into several parts to avoid overloading Substance 3D Painter, since its files can become quite large and heavy to use quickly. The main workflow here was to create a master material for the leather and metal, which I could then re-use for the different parts with minimal tweaking.

The materials have a lot of Color and Roughness variation to make them look believable, and looking at real-life references is key here. I also like to break down the different layers of detail in large, medium, and small details for everything. The most challenging part was getting the values for the Color and Roughness for the metal parts to look correct for different lighting scenarios, since they rely so much on reflections to look correct. I found that making them brighter and rougher than what seems correct in Substance 3D Painter seems to work better inside of Unreal Engine.

Lighting

For the lighting, I used a main directional light with an invisible white surface reflector to bounce lighting into the model, which avoids super dark shadows. I also had another directional light that is used as a subtle filler light, which also focuses light on the eye region to give it more reflections. Finally, I add several rim lights depending on the pose to get the silhouette to pop.

For the post-production, I used the post-process volume to change the gamma of the mid-tones and shadows to my liking, as well as adding some extra bloom and film grain for the fantasy look. I  included some dust particles that I made with the Niagara system in Unreal Engine. The depth of field is also controlled by the cinema cameras that Unreal Engine uses. Finally, the rendering that was used was Lumen.

Conclusion

The main challenge here was to get through the modeling of the ornaments, as well as learning Unreal Engine's materials and lighting, as well as how to control its viewport to get the best results, for the hair in particular. My main learning experience here was in adapting my previous workflows from Arnold renders into Unreal Engine. My advice for beginners would be to learn Unreal Engine with small projects instead of trying to do complex characters as you learn the different tools.

Andres Zambrano, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins