How to Sculpt and Texture a 3D Fighter Character with ZBrush and Substance 3D

Introduction

Hello! I'm Josh, a Character Artist from Melbourne. I started learning 3D in 2021 during lockdown, when I was stuck at home and looking for a way to channel my energy into something productive. I've always loved video games and movies, so I wanted to learn how to create the characters that inspired me. I began taking online courses through ArtHeroes, founded by the incredible artist Marlon Nunez, and continued learning from other artists online as I built the skills I needed to break into the industry.

I started working professionally in video games in 2023, and in my current role I focus primarily on facial sculpting for game characters. Alongside my professional work, I love working on my own projects as a way to keep learning, experimenting with new techniques, and, most importantly, making art that genuinely excites me.

One of my goals for this project was to strengthen my ability to finish personal projects. I had underestimated how difficult it can be to find the time and energy for personal work once you start working in the industry. After spending your day making characters in the studio, it can be surprisingly hard to come home and find the same creative energy for your own projects.

I was following J Hill's Character Class at my own pace while working on Iron Mitchell. I highly recommend the course. It gave me a repeatable workflow that I could apply to my own process and helped me become more consistent about seeing a character all the way to completion.

Reference Gathering

The foundation of any good project is strong references. I came across this concept by the artist Yao369 and immediately fell in love with the character design. My love for character art has been heavily influenced by fighting games, particularly Mortal Kombat, and I wanted to bring this character to life and see if I could hit that quality bar. For this project, I didn't want to recreate the concept 1:1, so I chose to put my own stylized realism spin on it instead.

I wanted to focus on the bust since I knew the project would take some time to complete because of the number of different elements needed. I wanted to make sure that I could finish the project within a reasonable time and spend as much time as I could polishing what I had. Overall, though, it still took me about 9 months to complete while working full time and taking breaks.

As you can see, there are a lot of separate elements going on in this character, so I broke it down visually to make it more approachable and clarify what I needed to do.

Casting Your Character

Something that J Hill talks about in his class, and something that I’ve also done with previous projects, was to "cast" your character. Pick a person that you want to base your character's face on, even if it’s not a likeness study. This helps you ground your character's face and make it believable, and kind of gain an understanding of the sort of vibe the character has.

In my case, I picked Mike Tyson because I felt that he matched the attitude that I wanted my character to have. I intentionally made the decision, though, that I didn't want this to be a likeness piece, as that can be a major undertaking in itself, and I felt it might distract from the character if he ends up in the uncanny valley.

I also used Triplegangers.com as they have a huge range of faces to look at, so it helped me to see different facial features and have a more generalized idea of what the facial forms I was sculpting should look like.

Workflow

For this project, I wanted to dive deep into using MetaHuman in Unreal Engine 5 since I've been seeing a lot of amazing artists online using it and getting great results. I started off by generating a MetaHuman in the Character Creator in Unreal and trying to get somewhat close to what I had in mind. As you can see, it's pretty generic, and I ended up drastically changing him in the end, but it helped provide a solid start for me to get going quickly.

While in most of my projects I would usually start from a sphere, I decided to start from a base this time so I could get going and work on the different elements more efficiently. I find that working on a body from scratch can sometimes be its own project, so I didn't want that to be a distraction from what I was trying to achieve.

Blockout

The blockout process was pretty straightforward. I wanted to get the main silhouette and shapes down first, trying not to move into detail too quickly since I knew I'd be moving back and forth and iterating, so I didn't want to zoom in just yet. I think it's important to focus on the big picture first and make sure it works well when zoomed out.

I used the ZModeler brush in this step as I wanted to keep the topology fairly clean so it would be more manageable. During this stage, I also fleshed out the back area. Since the concept only had a front view, I had to solve some problems like how the armgear attaches and what the back looks like.

Body

For the body, I wanted him to look intimidating in size and stature. I started out by plotting out where the anatomy landmarks would be on the body. Anatomy4Sculptors is a really good resource for this, and I could not recommend it enough. I use their reference books as well as the 3D viewer while I'm working to make sure I have the muscle groups in the correct locations.

Then, I started pushing and pulling with the Move Brush to work on his silhouette and proportions. Once I was in a good spot, I did a pass with Clay Buildup to soften out the forms and remove the markings I had laid out previously. Finally, I did a pass and added veins. I also used Surface Noise in ZBrush to add some tiling noise and breakup to the skin. 

Head

I absolutely love sculpting heads in 3D, so I left this bit until last, sort of like a carrot on a stick to keep me going. Cedric Peyravernay is one of my favorite artists. I've always been inspired by the way he paints portraits, with the sharp angles but still realistic sort of look, so I wanted to bring some of that into my work too. My process for sculpting heads is the same as before. I start out by plotting out anatomy landmarks, then work on the big shapes, and then soften the surface to make it feel more natural.

After all that work, my high poly is done! This process is not as linear as it appears, though, as in reality I spend a lot of time going back and forth, making edits to my high poly to reach a level I'm happy with.

Retopology and UVs

I decimate my meshes and bring them into Maya for retopology using Quad Draw. I find this process pretty relaxing, to be honest. It's a nice break from all the intense effort of working on the high poly. I just vibe out with headphones listening to music. After that's done, I UV unwrap my models in Maya and then export everything out into Marmoset Toolbag and bake my maps out to prepare for texturing. For the texture sets, I separate his outfit into metal and non-metal, so it ended up being pretty manageable.

Texturing

For texturing, I use Wrap to transfer maps from TexturingXYZ's VFace. I wrap their base head to my character's head and transfer all the maps I need. I really like the pore detail they provide and have been using it in my workflow for a while. I do the same with the body, transferring Albedo maps from 3DScanStore. This workflow gave me a solid start, and then I did some additional painting and color grading on top until I got the result I was happy with. I also baked out a cavity mask from the veins I sculpted in ZBrush and used that to generate the veins in the Color map.

Once I've done that, I'm ready to bring everything into Substance 3D Painter to get stuck into the texturing phase. My process is pretty straightforward, just looking up references and observing to make sure that I'm getting the materials to read properly. I use the same principles as sculpting when in this phase, working from primary, secondary, and tertiary details. During this step, I was exporting back and forth from Painter to Unreal Engine to double-check that my colors and materials look how I want.

Groom

For the groom, I chose to use XGen since I prefer the strand-based groom look and find it much more efficient to work with. I export my grooms as Alembic Cache and import them into Unreal Engine. Once I could see it in the game engine, I spent some time iterating the groom to make sure that it has the proper thickness and clumping that I was after.

Posing

I was able to take advantage of the MetaHuman rig since I used the meshes as a base while making sure the vertex order stayed the same. This was important because it allowed me to blendshape my meshes to the MetaHuman mesh while still being able to use the rig. I started out using the rig in Maya to get a basic pose going, then brought it into ZBrush and used Transpose Master for further refinements.

Honestly, I found the posing quite challenging, especially with his armgear, so it was important for me to take my time with this step and make sure there weren't any weird deformations in the mesh. After several iterations, though, I was quite happy with how his poses turned out.

Rendering

I chose to render with Unreal for this project since I was aiming for a game-ready character, and Unreal is very powerful, so I wanted to play with the tools. I rendered with Path Tracing to achieve the visual fidelity that I was aiming for.

My scene in Unreal is simple. I use a Key, Fill, and Rim light setup and have a dedicated light aimed at his eyeballs so that I can get those nice spec reflections in his eyes. I find that those small spec highlights add a lot of life to the character.

Post Process

After I get my renders from Unreal Engine, I push them a bit further by bringing them into Photoshop and using the Camera Raw filter settings. I've experimented with different ways to grade my renders before, but I find this one to be my favorite, as you can get some really good results.

Then, once I have something I'm happy with, I turn that into a Photoshop action so that I can batch grade all my renders with one click. I found this step to be valuable, as you can end up with hundreds of frames, especially if you're doing video.

Conclusion

I think my biggest takeaway from this project was not being afraid of iterating and allowing myself to be flexible enough to refine things. Nothing is ever final and can always be improved. While I was working, I had to keep pushing myself to move onto the next step of the process, even if I wasn't 100% happy with how things currently looked. I think this is important because it helped me avoid getting stuck and giving up on the project.

As J Hill talks about in his course, focus on getting it in engine as quickly as you can so you can see what work still needs to be done, and iterate from there. I also would say that being part of a community and getting feedback from your peers is very important, as it can help you spot things that you haven't noticed or just provide a morale boost when things are feeling difficult.

My advice for beginner artists is to always make the time for yourself to create personal work, no matter how busy your day gets, as that will keep you growing as an artist and will remind you of why you create. Work on things that you find inspiring and that you genuinely think are cool, because that will keep you going when the project is getting tough.

Thanks for reading!

Josh Linao, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine