How to Sculpt and Texture the Skin of a Realistic and Mysterious Old Vampire

Introduction

HI! My name is Lucia Aguirre (Luly), and I'm a 3D Character and Creature Artist living in Spain. I started my career like a lot of us do: as a 3D Generalist. After finishing my Fine Arts degree, disappointed and confused, I wasn't entirely sure what career path to follow, but I did know that I wanted to do something related to art and video games.

I discovered how fun 3D could be during a very basic 3ds Max class I took while studying my Master's Degree in Game Design and Development, and from that point on, I started experimenting on my own. I learned through YouTube tutorials, free Udemy courses, and hours and hours of practice in ZBrush with no clear direction at first. I worked as a Generalist for a couple of years, slowly transitioning into character art, which is what I enjoy the most.

Some of the projects I've most enjoyed working on include One Military Camp at Abylight Studios, Blades of Fire at MercurySteam Entertainment, and other projects that haven't been announced yet. I feel I've been given the space to be creative and to contribute in a meaningful way in each of them, which has really helped me grow as an artist.

Old Vampire Project

The Old Vampire started as my main project to follow J. Hill's Character Art course, which I took as a way to stay motivated and learn new techniques I might not have been aware of. I also love seeing how other artists approach their work. There's always something you can pick up from it.

I probably spent around six hours over a couple of days just searching for the right concept. I had some requirements in mind: I wanted to create a humanoid bust, and it had to include hair and realistic clothing. When I found this (sadly) AI-generated vampire, I fell in love. I also love sculpting "imperfect" skin, loose and wrinkly, so this was the perfect fit for me.

I find reference gathering so fun at the start of a new project, and I usually spend quite a bit of time on it. I wanted my old guy to feel rich, elegant, imposing, with a strong presence, and kind of sexy-scary, so I started by asking my friends and family if they had someone in mind who matched that energy. I got a lot of suggestions, but I finally landed on a mix of Bob Odenkirk and Jason Isaacs for the facial features, gaze, and overall vibe.

I usually organize my references in PureRef, grouping them by category such as facial references, skin details, types of clothing or fabrics, materials, hairstyles, and so on. I used generative AI to have some illustrated reference for the silver brooch and chest decorations, trying to get something that stayed close to the concept while also feeling functional and believable.

As expected, the original design had many of the typical AI issues: awkward shapes, deformations, and elements that made zero sense structurally. I think AI can be a useful tool in situations like this, but only as that: a tool to support the process, not a final result.

My reference board also includes ideas I considered but ultimately didn't incorporate into the final character, such as tattoos or goat-like eyes. You can also see photos of my own hands used as posing references, since I find finger posing to be the most challenging part of it.

Sculpting

I never start a project from scratch if I don't have to. When working on humanoid characters, I use base meshes and reuse as much as possible from previous projects, whether that's part of meshes, already sculpted clothing, or materials.

A great tool for reusing assets is the ZBrush plugin Zwrap, which allows you to wrap a low-poly mesh on top of a different mesh. It makes reusing hands, heads, and other assets really efficient, and I highly recommend it.

In this case, I wrapped a UVd low-poly hand mesh I created for a previous project and used it as a base for the old vampire's hands, and I used a male head base mesh as a starting point for the sculpt.

Sculpting the high-poly is one of my favorite parts of the process. I primarily use ZBrush, but I'm always thinking about the next steps when sculpting (how I'll approach texturing, and how to make things easier for when retopology comes…), so I tend to move back and forth between ZBrush and other apps.

The jewelry is a good example of this workflow: I start by sketching it out in ZBrush with a really rough DynaMesh, just to block in the main shapes. Then I use GoZ, a ZBrush plugin that acts as a bridge to other software, to send it to 3ds Max (my main 3D application).

There, I do a quick retopo pass to clean up the shapes and define sharp/soft edges, and I can also reuse this low-poly mesh later in the retopology stage. Finally, I bring it back into ZBrush to add subdivisions, refine the forms, and sculpt the final details.

Some of the ways I try to make my life easier for the next steps can be seen in elements like the chains and the lace trim on the coat. For the chains, I created a single low-poly chain link with UVs, used subdivisions to create the high-poly and bake it, then turned the low-poly into an IMM Curve brush and drew the chain directly in its final pose. This way, starting from just one link, I ended up with a fully mapped and baked chain.

The lace trim followed a similar approach. I first created a tileable high-poly trim in ZBrush and baked it onto a square plane with square UVs. For the actual low-poly trim, I duplicated the last loop on the edge of the coat sleeves and mapped each quad to the baked square trim, tiling it across the whole surface. Looking back, I think it would look better with a few more tile variations instead of just one, to give it more visual variety in the textures.

When sculpting the face, I believe having good quality references (and actually looking and understanding them) is a very big part of the work.  For skin, I don't rely on many brushes outside of Dam_Standard, the GIO brush, and a lot of smoothed Clay Buildup. For me, less is always more, and going from big, ugly, blocky shapes to smaller details is the right way to go. Focusing on fine details in an early stage would always be a problem later in terms of proportions and readability.

The poor vampire had placeholder hair for most of the creation process. Having a placeholder hairstyle is super helpful: It's an easy way to plan the overall shape, silhouette, how it integrates with the face and clothing, the larger masses that will cast shadows and create variation, and the thinner strands that break the shape and add flow. It's also very fast and easy to manipulate.

For the final hair, I wanted a game-ready approach, so I created hair cards.  I usually go for one of two methods for hair card placement:  If the hair is minimal (for example, a few strands coming out of a hood, very sparse facial hair, or subtle fur just for silhouette purposes), I bring the hair cards into ZBrush and place them manually using the Gizmo and Bend Curve deformation.

I find ZBrush's transformation tools the most comfortable out of all the 3D software I use, and adjusting the pivot placement is extremely quick, which really speeds up the process.

If I'm creating a full hairstyle (like in this case), I use the Hair Tool add-on for Blender by Bartosz Styperek. It's a very powerful addon with a wide range of customization options that covers the entire hair creation pipeline, from card baking to placement and export. I've used this addon multiple times and I love it, but since not all of my projects involve hair, I tend to forget parts of the workflow after long breaks.

I'm currently creating a tutorial for myself so I don't get frustrated every time I come back to it. It's mainly for personal use, but it might help others too, since the learning curve of the addon is quite steep. Using the addon, I baked a long, thin, mostly straight and somewhat messy set of hair cards. With my Unreal Engine hair shader in mind, I baked Depth, Flow, ID, Opacity, and Root Mask maps. Base color and variation are handled directly in the engine.

I also created the eyelashes and eyebrows in Blender using the same addon. After that, I followed my favorite placement technique, which is "Grid Placement." This method creates curves along the loops of a previously created grid that defines the general shape of a section of the hairstyle. From there, you can move the curves around and adjust the thickness, profile, and length of the cards using modifiers for noise, shape, thickness, or UV variation.

For the clothing, I used Marvelous Designer and ZBrush. Sometimes full cloth simulation isn't really necessary, as was the case with the undershirt the vampire is wearing. I created this piece directly in ZBrush using a Dynamic Subdivision mesh with thickness, and then sculpted the main folds and memory wrinkles by hand.

The coat was created first in Marvelous Designer, simulated on top of a placeholder body (which doesn't exist in the final mesh, since in video games, if something isn't visible, it doesn't need to actually be there) to establish the main shape. Then, I added thickness and sculpted the smaller folds as well as the wear and tear by hand in ZBrush.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted the coat to feel like an old, well-used but high-quality fabric, so it didn't need to look overly dirty or damaged. While sculpting, I kept in mind that the frayed edges would be baked onto alpha planes, and I also created four thin, individual threads baked onto planes to scatter around the coat, helping break up the silhouette and give it a more worn, lived-in feel.

Retopology and Texturing

I handle retopology in 3ds Max, and I use UVLayout for UV mapping and packing. UVLayout's UI looks super dated and is the least intuitive software I've ever used, but it is so good I don't really want to switch to anything else ever again.

Since this was a personal project and I wanted it to look good in renders, I split the asset into four texture sets: head, clothing, jewelry, and hands. The topology follows what I would typically create for a AAA game character, but it was later subdivided in Unreal Engine to achieve a smoother look for rendering.

I use Substance 3D Painter for texturing and rely heavily on references for everything: Roughness of the clothing, skin color variations, etc.  I also use Substance 3D Sampler to mix materials and create new variations, mostly for the coat, since I was aiming for a very specific type of fabric.

The embroidery was painted by hand using a Stitch brush I created a while ago that follows the path you draw. Afterward, I broke it up slightly so it would feel older and more worn. I usually go for vector paths in Substance 3D Painter for stitches and embroidery. I think it's one of the best tools they've added in recent years.

However, this time I wanted something that didn't look too perfect on every stroke. I was aiming for a more organic, handmade feel. I take advantage of anchor points to make multiple masks interact in an organic way. For example, between the coat fabric and the stitching.

I always approach skin textures the same way, starting with a few layers of red, blue, and yellow to build the epidermal tones and define the underlying structure: bony areas, regions where the skin is thinner, and blood sits closer to the surface, areas with more fat, and so on. These are then covered by a flat skin color, which I mask by hand to reveal more or less of the underlying variation.

On top of that, I add multiple layers using the Curvature map to introduce variation on peaks and valleys. The AO map is also useful for subtle color shifts. I then layer in moles and freckles, discoloration, veins, oily areas… around 80% of skin texturing comes from subtle variation. It's one of my favorite parts of creating a character.

Every layer is set up as a Fill layer with either procedural or hand painted masks since that gives me the flexibility to tweak things on the fly (what you see in Substance 3D Painter is always different than what you see in engine) and keeps the workflow non destructive, but I also like to add a paint layer on top where I manually paint subtle color variations where my heart tells me to.

Rendering

The final scene was rendered in Unreal Engine 5, taking advantage of its fantastic shader options for skin and clothing. I also used the MetaHuman eye model and shader, customized to fit my character. Getting the right emissive color for the eyes took me much longer than I'd like to admit.

I'm also very indecisive when it comes to lighting setups, so it changed quite a bit while I was working on the renders. Fine-tuning small details and moving sliders up or down by 0.01 at the end of the texturing process while reviewing everything in Unreal Engine can take a surprisingly long time.

For the main renders, I decided to use a backdrop. It's just a low-quality image of cathedral windows I found on Pinterest, placed on a plane. I blurred the image in Photoshop, pushed the color and saturation a bit, and added point lights in front of the windows in Unreal Engine so they would act as rim lights for the character. This works especially well with the hair and helps create a nice mood.

I decided to make a couple of videos to show the full character up close. I always feel the urge to showcase everything in every single render, which isn't ideal. I also tend to end up with a ton of renders, love them all, and then hate them the next day, so this is a long process for me.

Conclusion

It took me about three months of working on and off to finish this character. I enjoyed every part of the process, but the final stage, fine-tuning textures and shaders for the renders, was especially satisfying. My goal with this project was to create a more realistic piece for my portfolio, have fun, and refresh my Unreal Engine skills after a long break.

I didn't rely on any particularly new techniques, but it had been a while since I worked on a character like this, and many of the disciplines involved in this project were things I hadn't touched in quite some time. It pushed me out of the comfort zone I've been in for the last couple of years, so it ended up being a really valuable and enriching experience.

Luly Aguirre, 3D Character & Creature Artist

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford