J Hill on Creating Character with Story & Making YouTube Tutorials

My skills are a mixture of the effort I've put in over the years and the knowledge I've gained from really great people. This includes teachers, online courses, free tutorials, YouTube videos, blogs, forums, and articles. I've also been fortunate enough to meet talented people at various studios and jobs I've had, which has allowed me to ask them questions and learn from them.

This interest carried over when I started looking for colleges to apply to, and I ultimately ended up joining the Art Institute for Game Art and Design. 

Since becoming a professional Character Artist for games I've created characters for several games such as Apex Legends, Titanfall 2, Back 4 Blood, and Evolve.

My skills are a mixture of the effort I've put in over the years and the knowledge I've gained from really great people. This includes teachers, online courses, free tutorials, YouTube videos, blogs, forums, and articles. I've also been fortunate enough to meet talented people at various studios and jobs I've had, which has allowed me to ask them questions and learn from them.

The Dragon Hunter Project

I started my Dragon Hunter project a couple of years ago when I set out to create a little world. I was in conversations with another artist, planning big things for fun and what it could look like. We talked about things we could build together and I arrived at an opportunity to make a little world and maybe tell a little story as an ultimate goal.

To start with, I created one of the characters and fleshed them out. I hoped to potentially create more characters and maybe even tell a story with them. The character I chose was a typical protagonist – an overconfident young dragon hunter in it for the fame and the reward. He's a bit of a rogue, handsome, and maybe a little bit of a mess, but with a heart of gold.

While I'm not sure if I'll ever fully complete the project and the idea, I don't want to over-promise or give anything away if we were to be able to make something. But what I am willing to share is that I just thought of a little slice of something in a story that involved a few characters. So the next character I would make would be the female counterpart in the story, and then a third character could be the antagonist. Each of these characters would represent a relationship to dragons in a different way. Obviously, the dragon itself would be a character in the little story that I would like to tell – it's about the meeting of all these four characters.

My workflow for creating the character began with gathering references to clarify and find examples of the tone I was looking for. Then, I started roughing it out in ZBrush, which is how I begin every character project. Even if I'm not exactly sure where it would go, I start there and use digital clay to sketch things out, move things around, and try things. After that, I might do painting on top with Photoshop or something similar. For some reason, I don't typically start in TDF; I start in 3D to get a feel for the character.

After blocking out the model and figuring out a direction to go in, I switched and committed to it, spending time making the more refined high-poly models and delving into the details.

Eventually, I realized that one of the important aspects of this character was to make him feel like a rogue and a traveler in another world. To show that visually, I created a costume that had a lot of different elements on it that weren't necessarily related but could, hopefully, paint a picture of a more worldly person that has various things on them that reflect the journey they've been on. That meant creating a variety of different things and creating them in a variety of design languages. It took longer to do that because there were more unique things to make and unique problems to solve. I leaned into that and enjoyed myself, spending nights making the lace for a gauntlet or something similar.

After the high poly was done, that was as far as I had ever planned to go. While making him, I didn't want to just stop; I wanted to do materials and bring him to life. Rather than just stopping at high poly and going through all the extra effort of making a production model, I wanted to experiment with a half-step. I posed the character using ZBrush and then decimated most of the models to make them lower poly but kept poly paint as the main color and brought it into Blender.

Then, I made materials that were procedural and could just project things in the world, so I didn't have to worry about typology and making it production-ready. I didn't deal with any rigs and didn't do any texturing other than the face, which I textured traditionally using Substance 3D Painter. The rest of the body was procedural materials and stuff using textures I had in my library and some downloaded from Substance Source. Then, I mixed all of that together in Blender.

I also had to make the hair in Blender, and that was one of the reasons why I tried to do the final look dev in Blender since their hair system was new at the time I was planning to render it. I don't have that much experience in Blender, so I thought it was a good opportunity to try and take the character I was working on and finish it with Blender to force myself to look into things and figure out ways to do things I'm interested in doing because there are a lot of upsides to Blender, and I just don't have that much experience with it.

The main challenge was the design. Design is not something I'm naturally good at, but it was something I wanted to get better at through this project. Although I learned a lot, one of the biggest lessons was to not jump in too quickly. While I typically tell myself to move fast at the beginning of a project, with designing my own character, it's crucial to put a lot of thought into it in the beginning. I mistakenly jumped in with the idea of a "dragon hunter guy who's handsome and cool" and wasted time because I took a long way around to figure out how to better visually show the things I wanted to convey about the character. The final design came eventually, but it took longer than it needed to.

The main challenge was the design. Design is not something I'm naturally good at, but it was something I wanted to get better at through this project. Although I learned a lot, one of the biggest lessons was to not jump in too quickly. While I typically tell myself to move fast at the beginning of a project, with designing my own character, it's crucial to put a lot of thought into it in the beginning. I mistakenly jumped in with the idea of a "dragon hunter guy who's handsome and cool" and wasted time because I took a long way around to figure out how to better visually show the things I wanted to convey about the character. The final design came eventually, but it took longer than it needed to.

Annatar

Last year, I created an Annatar model during the run of the Rings of Power show. The show really kicked things off for me. Annatar had been on my list of characters to create for a while, and as a fan of Lord of the Rings, I found the idea of Sauron having an angelic form to be immediately interesting.

While watching the show, I thought we might see Annatar, and I wanted to create my own interpretation before being influenced by the show's creators. At the time, it wasn't revealed who Annatar or Sauron was, and they ended up going in a different direction, skipping over the angelic Annatar who convinced the elves. But the idea of a sexy Sauron was fun and interesting to me, and it gave me an excuse to spend time in Middle Earth and create fantasy things, which I’ll always enjoy doing.

Nima

My Nima project which was based on and inspired by the work of Ross Tran was the second personal project I worked on using Unreal Engine 5. I still wasn't using it for my job at the time but I wanted to use the latest software and tools and try new things.

Through this project, I was able to learn a lot about topics that I'm interested in but don't normally have the opportunity to explore, such as hair with animated physics, animation in general, and sound design. To achieve this, I built a simple rig and used simple morph targets to create a specific look.

I also experimented with Niagara to create an effect on the sword and make the pedals fall. Overall, this project was an opportunity for me to create a small animated video and challenge myself to try new things that I hadn't done before.

Unreal Engine

I was first introduced to and began using Unreal Engine in college, maybe 20 years ago or something at this point. I stopped using it for a long time while working in the industry, but then I found it again at one of my jobs that was using it. Now, at Turtle Rock Studios, I've been using Unreal to make the games we've been working on for the last five-plus years. In addition to that, I download it for free at home and work on personal projects with it when I can. So, I have plenty of experience in a couple of different ways, but it still feels like I'm scratching the surface. It still feels like there's so much to learn when I use it so I try to take notes for myself. It's great that there are so many talented, smart, and generous people making tutorials and videos out there, which is so helpful.

What I love about Unreal Engine is that it's real-time, fast, and looks good. You can do so much with it, and it just makes me want to create things. Of all the software and tools that I use to make CG art, Unreal Engine is the most exciting and stimulating. It provides opportunities in a way that everything else doesn't. I love making models and stuff, but Unreal Engine allows me to make them move around and tell a story, make a game, or make a movie. That's just so great. I really love what Epic is doing and how they're changing everything.

I think everyone who is mildly interested in using it and learning should just do it. My advice is simple: download it. It's free. Check out some of their demos, documentation, and videos online. The one thing to keep in mind is that it changes and updates so much that finding outdated help and resources might be a problem. Still, don't talk yourself out of doing it. Just get in there and start making something. The best thing to do is to try and work on some sort of project that you're interested in, and all the things you need to learn to get it done will present themselves. That's a good way to learn all the things you don't know but need to learn.

YouTube

Nearly 20 years ago, I started my YouTube channel as a way to fulfill my desire to create content that I would enjoy and that others would appreciate too. In my first video, I explained that I wanted to create videos that would reflect my interests and that would allow me to share my knowledge with others.

Since then, my YouTube channel has become a creative outlet for me, combining my three main interests: CG art, video production, and teaching. I am constantly striving to improve my skills in each of these areas, with a goal to keep making art, creating better videos, and eventually telling stories. I also aim to become a better teacher, with the hope of passing on my knowledge to others who are interested in the same things.

When it comes to choosing a subject for my videos, I take a personal approach. For tutorials, I may write a script detailing the steps and then record myself going through them, both in real-time and edited versions. I use my studio, which is always ready to go, to record high-quality videos of myself or my screen, with an interesting background and a desk-mounted camera connected to my computer.

Overall, my YouTube channel is a way for me to explore my interests and share my knowledge with others who are interested in the same things. Through my channel, I hope to inspire others to pursue their interests and to help them improve their skills in CG art, video production, and teaching.

It has been an important part of my life, allowing me to explore my interests and share my knowledge with others. Through my channel, I hope to inspire others to pursue their interests and passions and to help them improve their skills in whatever they’re doing.

My channel has been instrumental in helping me with my art, and that was one of the reasons why I started it. Teaching something forces you to be on another level, and I was hoping to become a good teacher. To do that, I would need to learn more and go over things repeatedly. Teaching also helps to present ideas in a more digestible way, which leads to a better understanding of the subject matter.

I record my projects all the time, so I essentially have a replay of the entire process. Even when I'm editing the video and transforming a hundred-hour project into a 20-minute video, it provides me with a different perspective and postmortem analysis that others don't have access to. The entire process of recording, editing, and teaching helps me learn more with each project. This, in turn, makes me a better artist and teacher.

I learn new things every time, although I probably can't remember them all, so I try to write them down.

Conclusion

My advice to beginner artists is simple: make art every day. Create for as long as you want to.

It's important to never lose sight of the joy and the reason why you wanted to create art in the first place. Keep it simple and ground yourself in the whole point. There are many distractions and things that can suck the joy out of art, especially when it comes to mixing art and commerce. There is a lot of noise out there, so it's important to have fun, follow your interests, and make things that are true to yourself.

I believe that art is a lifestyle and that everyone is an artist, whether they practice it or not. Practicing art every day is a good way to live life and can be beneficial.

J Hill, Lead Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine