CREATE STYLISH HAND-PAINTED CHARACTER ART

Video game artist Weston Reid reveals the process for building his stylised Wild West-inspired character

- Weston Reid

Stylised characters are my passion, and in this tutorial I'll go through my steps for creating a high-quality unlit and hand-painted character from start to finish. This process will involve using ZBrush for the high-poly creation, Modo for retopology and UVs, Marmoset Toolbag for baking and final rendering, and both Substance 3D Painter and 3DCoat for the texturing process. You'll be able to use this workflow for any hand-painted characters, props or environment pieces.

The aim here is to leverage the strength of several pieces of software to create quality models and textures efficiently. We'll use ZBrush and lots of ZModeler, plus Dynamic Subdivision workflows to create clean meshes, as well as DynaMesh and basic primitives to generate the organic shapes needed in our concept.

ZModeler will help create clean topology that can be reused in the low-poly stage, which will speed up our retopology and get us to the texturing quicker. We'll also make use of Substance 3D Painter for the initial greyscale creation of our texturing, before going to 3DCoat to add in the hand-painted element.

Substance 3D Painter will be our central software for all of the texturing work, where we can use masking and generators to always have control over elements, while 3DCoat will be used for its natural brush quality and flexibility in painting. Each step is intended to be non-destructive and provide flexibility that can be applied in personal or professional settings.

01 FIND YOUR REFERENCE

Before starting work on any model, we'll first find a concept to model and texture from. For this project, the original concept was designed by JohnnyD and found on ArtStation. With the concept, begin by opening ZBrush and loading one of the default male or female ZTools, which will only be used for scale reference before being deleted.

02 USE ZTOOLS