How To Model & Texture A Wastepunk Cool Girl With Various Materials & Props

Introduction

Hello! My name is Lucrezia, and I'm a 24-year-old French Character Artist. I graduated about a year ago after five years of studying Game Art at Rubika Supinfogame. There, I explored everything from concept art and modeling to sculpting and animation. Out of all these disciplines, I hesitated for a long time about which specialty to pursue. Character art stuck with me — I've always loved drawing characters, as well as the technical sides of CG, so combining that with video games felt like the perfect combination.

During my studies, I worked on various student games and projects as a 3D generalist. Now, I'm currently working at Sloclap, the studio behind Sifu, on our upcoming game Rematch as a Junior Character Artist.

I've learned everything from my teachers, classmates, tons of online tutorials, and more recently, my colleagues at Sloclap. So big shoutout and thanks to them!

About The Wastepunk Project

I started this project during my final school year, working on it in my free time. I wanted to create a strong portfolio piece before my graduation that looked like it could fit in an AAA Game. The concept for Wastepunk, drawn by Hongbo Yang, immediately stood out to me: it was colorful and packed with a variety of elements and materials such as metal, cloth, skin, and weapons — everything! I thought it would be perfect to learn and showcase my abilities. However, it took a lot more time than I anticipated. I ended up continuing to work on it alongside my first job, finishing it about a year after graduation!

Originally, I planned to turn the whole process into a tutorial. I recorded about 200 hours of footage before realizing that with no editing experience, it would take forever to put together. I also had so much to learn myself and made plenty of mistakes along the way. So, I dropped the tutorial idea but committed to finishing the project. In fact, having started it as a tutorial really pushed me to be technically rigorous, especially with things like clean topology, UVs, and overall optimization.

Scrutinizing every aspect of the concept before starting took time, but it was worth it — it helped me avoid unpleasant surprises when translating a 2D design into 3D. I wanted to challenge myself by adapting the concept into a more realistic style, which meant making a lot of decisions up front and gathering photo references for each element. For the references, I aimed to find at least three per element, one for the shape/proportions, one for the micro-details, and one for the texturing.

At first, the concept felt intimidating, but I broke it down by identifying repeating elements and simplifying the main shapes. What kept me inspired was thinking about the story behind the character: the world she lives in, her personality, her past, and the kind of game she might appear in. The Last of Us was a huge influence on the tone and atmosphere I imagined.

Modeling

For sculpting, I started from a sphere, a decision I regretted for how much time it cost me in contrast to starting from a base mesh! But in hindsight, it was a great anatomy exercise.

I began by blocking out the basic forms, gradually working up to the muscles, and refining the A-pose to communicate the character's attitude and personality. At this stage, I kept it extremely low-poly, using primitive shapes.

I kept a mental checklist for anatomical accuracy of things like the width of the wrist matching three fingers, the hand fitting the face, and the feet being roughly forearm length, which made a big difference later on. The book Anatomy for Sculptors (and its Ecorche 3D model) was a constant reference.

To avoid getting too used to the A-pose, I used Mixamo animations to test the character in motion, which really helped highlight major proportion issues. (As you can see below, there were plenty!)

It also helped to try different lighting scenarios on the character, even as early as the blockout stage.

The clothing parts required a lot of references, especially the cape. The original concept was very stylized, but I aimed for a more realistic result. For the cape that had to sit on the tank, I used ZBrush Cloth Simulation and then sculpted folds on top of it. Each clothing item was sculpted with material thickness in mind, keeping folds and shapes artistically controlled.

I spent a lot of time on the eyes, sculpting the irises using radial symmetry. I've used the MetaHuman eye shader in past projects and loved the result, but for this piece, nothing could beat ray-traced refraction. So, I built the eye with multiple layers: a transparent cornea, a meniscus, and even an occlusion layer to give it proper depth and realism. Definitely overkill for a game asset, but perfect for a portfolio piece! I also created a simplified version using only the MetaHuman eye mesh for real-time use.

The weapon was fully done in ZBrush with ZModeler, as I often prefer staying in one software to keep my workflow focused. I started from a ǪCube, which already has a low-topo and polygroups. I relied a lot on polygroups and creases, and built it so my lowest subdiv would be my lowpoly. To easily extract the bandages, I used the Panel Loops in ZBrush.

Throughout sculpting this character, I used brushes like DamStandard, Clay, hPolish, Slash2, and TrimSmoothBorder. To clean up and polish wobbly sculpts, I used Clay Polish and micro-detail alphas in ZBrush. I also applied some polypaint to better visualize each aspect of the character. Once the character was retopologized, UVed, and textured, I went back to refine the lowpoly in ZBrush, nudging stuff around with the Move brush.

Seeing everything under proper lighting with finalized textures made certain proportion issues more noticeable, so I made many adjustments to improve the overall balance. The same thing was true with texturing; nothing was linear. I adjusted the sculpt, the proportions, the textures, and even the UVs along the way. It really was a lot of software gymnastics!

The whole sculpt took quite some time because of all the different materials and the number of asymmetrical elements. However, some habits made me save a lot of time down the line: I relied on a strict naming convention and a clean file hierarchy to stay organized. To safely iterate, I duplicated subtools and used morph targets to iterate safely — sometimes the earlier versions even turned out better! I often used ZRemesher to create clean geometry with a good subdivision range as well as clean polygroups.

Hair Pipeline

For the hair, I started by analyzing references to identify the types of strand textures I'd need. I approach hair as a system of layers — denser, thicker strands at the base, transitioning to thinner, finer ones toward the outer layers. Following that logic, I created a small set of textures, ranging from thick clumps to wispy flyaways.

When it comes to card placement, there's flexibility — the textures don't need to match 1:1 in length; you can stretch them slightly without a noticeable loss in quality. Still, I made sure to create shorter strand textures specifically for the bangs, eyelashes, and flyaways where compression would be more visible.

Technically, you could build a haircut with two or three strand types, but since I had UV space, I added more to introduce subtle variety and avoid repetition.

To place the hair, I built a custom IMM brush in ZBrush with pre-mapped planes, each linked to a single strand texture. I used Bend Curve to shape the cards, starting with the base layer using thick strands. Then I duplicated the layer, reassigned its UVs to a finer strand texture, and scaled it up so it sat on top of the lower layer, moving some cards around to give it a new shape. Layer by layer, this approach helped me build natural volume and breakup. I added a lot of care to the flyaways. They're key to breaking that "CG" look, and I think they add a nice subtle layer of storytelling to the character. For the technique, I followed this tutorial by Rodesqa ____:

I generated the strand textures in FiberShop, which provided all the maps I needed — color, alpha, normal, flow, and ID — for precise shader control. The flow/anisotropy map is probably the most important one for hair. After placing all my haircards, I went back to FiberShop to fine-tune the hair textures. This allowed me to make some changes, as long as the width and length of the strands didn't change, since all my UVs were already placed.

I also created a second UV set for the hair without overlaps, which I used to bake an additional AO texture for the final haircut. This adds that extra depth to the hair.

Topology

I started to do the retopology all by hand for the tutorial I planned to record, but once I dropped that plan (which was around that step), I switched to Houdini's Topo Transfer for the body and used ZRemesher for the rest. Some parts, like the mechanical arm and grenades, were modeled with ZModeler with the lowpoly in mind from the start. I still spent a lot of time in 3ds Max collapsing loops together to remove all the unnecessary edges, as well as hidden faces (especially in the hair). I also added some cuts for the folds on the skirt and shirt, so they would still keep a sharp silhouette in the low poly. For the hard-surface parts, I just needed to add back a little chamfer on the hard edges to avoid a visibly low-poly appearance.

For unwrapping, I organized assets by material types: metals on one set, cloth and organics on another, and the face and large elements like the cape on dedicated sets. Using RizomUV helped me achieve the most optimization on the UVs. I prioritized having squared UVs rather than relaxed ones, as I knew I could use triplanar projection in Substance 3D Painter. This helped in achieving a clean bake without any aliasing on the edges of the UV islands.

Texturing

Texturing is hands down my favorite part of the process. I'll admit I tend to get a bit eager to finish the sculpting part, but when it comes to tweaking layers and adding surface details, I can easily spend just as much time as I did building the character. To avoid setting my PC on fire, I split everything into separate Substance projects by material type — metal, cloth, organics, etc. It was a bit of a pain, but using Marmoset for real-time feedback made it manageable thanks to its automatic texture reloading.

For wear and tear, I focused a lot on the Albedo Map, and put many dirt layers: I estimate that dirt layers make up around 60% of the Albedo Map. My goal was to tell a story through the textures, thinking about where dirt would accumulate as she walks, where the fabric might wear out or tear, and how different materials age over time. I studied models from Uncharted and The Last of Us extensively.

I start with a mostly procedural texturing pass using all the generators available in Substance. During this stage, I often go back and forth between Substance and my UVs — adjusting seams to make selections easier — and I use the ID map baked from ZBrush to speed things up. This workflow allows me to reimport the mesh with updated UVs without breaking the setup. I try to maintain procedural flexibility as much as possible.

Throughout the process, I frequently bring the textures into Marmoset to test them under different lighting scenarios, which I highly recommend, especially for roughness maps, as their look can vary a lot depending on the lighting. Once I'm happy with the procedural base, I move on to the hand-painted details that really elevate the texture quality, like subtle color accents and facial features. I didn't want the result to feel like I just threw on some noise, so I carefully layered grime, stains, and wear to achieve a grounded, gritty realism, and removed it in places it didn't make sense to overdo it.

Instead of sculpting all the micro details, I added much of the fine wear, like facial wrinkles, residual clothing folds, and subtle leather damage, during texturing using Height Maps. This gave me more flexibility to iterate and experiment.

One of the biggest challenges was balancing all the texture components. I gave equal attention to albedo, roughness, normal, and metalness, making sure each contributed meaningfully to the final result. Putting the ambient occlusion into the albedo helped reinforce depth and added richness to the surface.

I also prepared custom texture channels — like cavity maps, masks for the micro-normal tiling (so it doesn't tile on the clothing parts that are welded to the skin, for instance), and a subsurface scattering mask — designed to work seamlessly with my shader setup for better material definition and realism. Having less SSS on the moles, freckles, eyelids, and inside the nostrils really adds that extra layer of realism by breaking the uniformity of the subsurface effect, mimicking how real skin varies in translucency.

Lighting & Rendering

Lighting can make or break a model. For characters, I rely on a reliable three-point lighting setup that works in most situations :

• Key light: This is your main light source. I placed it to cast shadows I liked and to match the mood of the character. I went for that Rembrandt lighting — it's always flattering, adds depth, and brings focus to the eyes.
• Rim light: Positioned on the shadowed side of the model to help separate the silhouette from the background. It gives a nice sense of volume.
• Fill light: I combined an HDRI (chosen mainly for how it affected reflections) with a bounce light hitting the face from below to lighten the shadows.

Beyond those, I added a few highlight lights:

• One focused light on the weapon to make it stand out.
• Some fake bounce lights under the bangs, which cast overly harsh shadows.
• A couple behind the ears to show off that nice subsurface scattering effect.

I also played around with some other lighting scenarios, but I felt they added too much information on an already information-heavy character.

For rendering, I used Marmoset Toolbag 4. It's my go-to for fast iteration, real-time feedback, and flexible lighting setups.

Post-production was pretty minimal. I added a bit more bloom, sharpening, and saturation in Photoshop, but honestly, most of the look came from carefully tweaking the textures in Substance 3D Painter and shaders directly in Marmoset. I prefer getting the final image as close as possible in-engine rather than relying on heavy editing afterward.

Summary

It's hard to estimate the exact time it took to finish everything. About a year and a half passed from the moment I first opened ZBrush to the final render, but I worked on it off and on, usually in 2–3 hour sessions with breaks that sometimes lasted a month or two. On top of that, I rigged and animated the character, which I had never done before. Just that part probably took me around four months. Because I was working on this project during my free time, I'd often come back after a break and suddenly see things I didn't like anymore, so I kept redoing parts over and over. I felt everything could always be improved! It was the curse of not having a deadline.

The biggest challenge was definitely the animation. I had to learn everything from scratch, and it was frustrating not getting the results I wanted right away. But I'm really glad I pushed through — it gave me a whole new perspective on how characters move and deform, which is incredibly useful as a character artist. Another main challenge was having a lot of wear on the character, without her looking too noisy.

If I had some advice for beginners, it would be:

• Don’t worry if you think your character looks "ugly". This character felt like that for hundreds of hours before I was finally happy with the result, so keep iterating between sculpting, texturing, and lighting, and knowing it's not a linear process. Character creation takes time, so be patient and trust the process.
• Even if you spend a lot of time on it, try to stay detached enough so it's easier to choose to rework a part completely, and to take criticism constructively.
• Focus your efforts on the face and upper torso — it's what people notice and remember most.
• And finally, think through the logic of your design, even if the concept doesn't make sense. If you cut corners, it'll show.

Thank you to 80 Level for the opportunity and thoughtful questions, and to anyone who took the time to read through this, I hope you learned a thing or two! You can find me on ArtStation and LinkedIn.

Lucrezia Romeo, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine