Modeling a Hand-Painted Character Using ZBrush, 3DCoat, Maya & Substance 3D Painter

Introduction

My name is Rémy Lauret. I've been working in 3D for five years, with almost four years of professional experience. I'm currently part of the team at Gameloft Montreal, working on Disney Dreamlight Valley on different stuff like kits, houses, and props. I also did some freelancing for different companies, and before that, I was at Ubisoft Paris Mobile working on the game Arena Survivor.

I attended an art school where I learned the fundamentals. After graduating, I dedicated much time to personal projects to explore different techniques and workflows. Right now, what I enjoy the most is the hand-painting process.

Workflow

For this project, it had been a long time since I wanted to create a fully finished character, so I challenged myself to do it. It was super fun and also very challenging! With each project I make, I really try to push my hand-painting skills further, since that's what I truly enjoy doing right now. I was inspired by a concept created by Jiayu Chen. My main goal for this project was to use a fully hand-painted workflow.

As you can see, I used a lot of references, because when I start a new project, I don't want to follow the concept pixel-perfectly. I really enjoy tweaking things, adding my own ideas, and trying different approaches. What I love most about doing personal projects is having that creative freedom.

At the beginning, it depends on what I need to do, but usually I start in Maya for the hard-surface part.

As you can see, it's just the carapace and cannon parts that I made in Maya, and for the body, I'm more used to doing it directly in ZBrush. I sculpt in ZBrush, and I do some back and forth with Maya to match the carapace and the body, because in this image, it's the first step, and the proportions are not good yet.

After being happy with the shape and proportions, I began to add some details to the character.

And how I made the tentacles: I mostly used Curve Tubes to create the base, and after that, I used Move and DamStandard for the sharp edges. After this detailing phase, the second image is the final sculpt result.

For the wood and metal parts, I used the same workflow I used for my Drake Sword and Hand-Painted Scene projects. Also, something really important for me is not to hesitate to ask for feedback from your friends or other artists, because thanks to that, you'll always get a better result. Sometimes when you're deep into your work, it can be complicated to take a step back.

For the retopo part, I mostly use Decimate, since it's not going to be animated or used in a game. But for my bake, I generally explode my mesh to get a clean result.

After baking my high-poly, I reimport my combined low-poly to keep the bake details and see everything together.

For the texturing, I started with the base colors in Substance 3D Painter to build up all the essential details like ambient occlusion, cavity, curvature, color variation, etc. I also used SoMuchDiffuse to help me with the lighting direction.

Hand-Painting

Once the base was done, I moved into 3DCoat to work on the hand-painted details. I don't have a lot of specific tips for this stage because it mostly takes time and practice. However, having good references is extremely helpful. I can show more in detail for the wood and metal.

What I also learned is to be really careful with the lighting and main focus in your hand-painted work, because for me, for example, near the end, I didn't really have a clear focal point.

A big thanks to Jordan Ewing for his feedback! After that, here is the final result in 3DCoat:

For the render, I used Marmoset Toolbag. I just tweaked the color tones a bit, and that's it, since it's a fully hand-painted prop, all the information is already in the texturing, as you can see before and after the render.

Conclusion

For me, the most challenging part of this project was really pushing the hand-painted process and finally finishing a full character, since I'm usually more used to only doing the high-poly. In this project, it was super fun to go through all the steps, and I learned a lot once again about hand-painted projects, especially about lighting and focal points on an object.

One thing that's really important for me is to always have good references and not to hesitate to ask for feedback, because that's what truly helps make your personal or professional projects better.

Rémy Lauret, 3D Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins