How to Sculpt an Intriguing and Mysterious Worship Leader

Introduction

Hello, my name is Mattéo Contant. I'm a Character Artist who's been working in the 3D field for 5 years now. I discovered 3D and my passion for it through Naughty Dog's "Grounded" documentary on The Last of Us. That documentary shaped my decision to pursue a career in this field. I subsequently enrolled at New3dge in Paris five years ago, where I developed my skills and reached my current level through those years of training. I've contributed to two student projects, FLINCH'S FARM and MIGRATION, the latter being the most recent project I worked on.

Migration Project

The Migration project, and more specifically the Worship Leader character I'm presenting here, was developed as part of a group project in collaboration with various specialties at New3dge, including Concept Artists. I received the concept art for the Worship Leader from Tiffany Louis, a Concept Artist at New3dge.

I pushed the work as far as I could to achieve a realistic result while staying true to the project's art direction, which leaned heavily into an industrial, salvaged aesthetic, drawing on real-world references like worn clothing, scrapped industrial parts, old pipes, and similar materials. Given the character's complexity and design, I tried to push this piece as far as possible.

Modeling

For the modeling of this character, I started from ZBrush's base mannequin, where I quickly blocked out the shape of his puffer jacket. I then moved on to Marvelous Designer to get a clean, realistic sculpting base to work from, which allowed me to resculpt on top of it and bring better flow and harmonization to the overall shapes.

Topology

The topology for this character was a bit of a technical challenge, since I had to balance preserving the shape's detail with keeping things optimized. I retopologized the character in Maya and unwrapped the UVs in RizomUV. We're working with 3 UV sets, sitting at around 110k triangles. For the UVs, I overlapped as many as possible to save space and maximize texel density.

Texturing

Texturing was a genuinely interesting and rewarding part of the process. I did real research to figure out how to properly approach the degradation and wear on his clothes. I textured the entire character in Substance 3D Painter, starting with a global pass on the clothing before moving into finer details and wear and tear.

I tried to push that salvaged, makeshift feel by adding rips, duct tape, drips, stains, and similar details. I textured his clothes while staying as faithful as possible to the concept, while also layering in additional storytelling elements.

The most challenging piece to texture was his puffer jacket, which required a lot of shader work in Unreal Engine to capture that satin-like sheen using Fresnel effects and anisotropy. This was the piece I put the most care into, since it's the "hero" piece of the character.

Thanks to this shader, I was able to create different variations of the character within the scene by adjusting the color depending on his position, using different color ranges. This setup let me achieve results ranging from a silk-like finish to a suede-like finish – the shader is fully custom-built and procedural.

I also put in a lot of work on the character's simulation, which turned out to be the biggest challenge of the whole process – having to manage how the different clothing layers interact with each other while avoiding interpenetration. I used Unreal Engine's Rigid Body node for this, and the rigging and skinning were also done entirely within that same software.

Rendering

I used Unreal Engine exclusively for the entire rendering process, including both the lighting and the final render. In post-production, I mainly worked with color grading, bloom, and sharpening settings to achieve the most realistic result possible.

Conclusion

The biggest challenges on this project were mainly related to managing the clothing simulation to animate the character. Since the character was so complex and had so many layers, this created a real difficulty that turned out to be quite challenging to overcome.

I learned an enormous amount throughout this project, whether in texturing, Marvelous Designer, or especially shader creation. What advice would I give to beginners? Honestly, just don't give up. If you love what you do, keep going, push through, and don't let go, especially if it's your passion.

Matteo Constant, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins