Full 3D Character Workflow Explained - Sculpting, Retopo & Textures 

I am watching from the future and.... you can paint across Udims in Substance Painter!!!! :D :D :D

I really appreciate how you guys talk about realistic approaches to the process in actual production. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. It's super helpful and appreciated.

Thank you guys for all the work you put into these vids! Honestly you guys are the only solid source on RU-vid that answers all of these really specific questions for us beginners! Just bought a bunch of your premium tutorials, keep up the great work!

My Monday are much better with every flipped normals video on my morning. Thank you for the job your are putting into. #BackToTheGrass

Thank you so much for this series, it's so helpful and clear! The discussions are hilarious and it makes everything much less daunting!

Needed something like this. Cheers guys.

Thank you for such an in depth process video. I'm always curious about pipelines, since it seems like everyone has their own variation of the same thing.

Hi, I saw few of your tutorials since last couple of weeks and I must say that you guys are savior, learned a lot from you guys, specially the way you guys discuss that give loads of knowledge , Thank you so much sir.

Thanks for that retopo landmark loops tip, I more or less do that as I go or do it part by part on broken up models, but doing a pass on all major feature loops before filling anything else in is something I should try on my next full body character.

This is the video I've been trying to find I can look up how to do any individual part, I wan't to know the process.

this porjection step is what I nearly missed so i am really greatfull for you guys explaining the process. I am still pretty new to sculpting in zbrush but after doing the manual retoplogisng in maya for this current project im doing (which has some interesting anatomy). then I was about to go into zbrush and try and match the detailing I already did, but i had this red warning in my head as I was thinking that it was surely not the way to approach it. so I am glad to know that you just need to project the sculpt onto the low top mesh and that I didn't waste any extra time on this :)

Thank you.I did'nt know why I didn't think to just project the displacement map in ZBrush

Incredible! This helps connect the dots to appreciate what people go through in the actual flow to bring out beautiful images on the big screen! It also gives a view into the characters' life cycle before it matures to act out in a scene!!!!

Thank you for your videos, its good to hear it from people who know what they're talking about.

that is the best intro i have ever seen, thank you.

Found you guys channel recently, love it btw and really enjoy listening to your podcasts when sculpting, etc. Thanks for all the advice and work you guys do!

Thank you for making this video. You help me a lot of understanding the workflow of a character .

You guys are great to watch and hear. I bought 2 tutorials a couple days ago. I feel like I grasp more knowledge from you two then I did in school 🤦🏾‍♂️🤙🏾

definitely interested in hearing more about the problems with smoothed uvs and the others mentioned in the displacement map section

I have been looking for this kind of video for a long time. Very big help for beginners like me!

I am looking forward to seeing this Painter tutorial... I still need to figure out how to view displacement maps.

Thank you so much guys! This video answered many questions for me. One thing I'm not sure about yet is breaking symmetry on the character - like when moving facial features around a bit and all that... Where would that step happen in the pipeline?

Thank you so much, this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Love ur videos.

Awesome as always! Big thanks guys!!!! ❤️💜♥️

thank you! i'm just starting out and this video was super helpful!

Thank you so much for this video. There is so much to learn here. 😄

You guys have really helped my workflow a a lot! Thanks for all the information.

Thank you for another great video :) I'd be very interested to see how you guys go about detailing human characters! With Creatures you have so much creative freedom when working on details but humans (especially young people) have very smooth skin. I really struggle with that aspect once i am done getting the proportions and muscles right. I would love a video elaborating how to properly add pores, wrinkles, veines and the like.

Thank you guys this really clarified some things about character workflow, especially the retopo part.I just picked up your Vray Tutorial, but now I need to get these premium character tutorials so Merry Christmas. Oh please post the Substance Tutorial asap that is a much needed tool as they have us using Mudbox in class...death to Mudbox

I am so glad that you guys mentioned blender as a great tool for modelling and retopology!... I have learned a lot in this video especially the blocking of retopology!

I want to know the folder arrangement/organization system for big projects. Great video by the way.

You guys are awesome. Thanks for making this video

Já vou dar like antes de assistir só pela iniciativa de compartilhar esse assunto conosco!!!

Cool! Thank you for tutorial ;) really professional!

Every tutorial on this channel are awesome.

Fantastic info, Thank you.

Very informative, you guys are awesome!

Very helpful. Hope to see a full character pipeline from scratches to final render shot just like Hollywood movies

Hi my teachers i just want to say i love you

Hey, I noticed if you do it right, zremeshing at half a few times gives you clean topo. Just a thought.

Really helpful! Thank you!

Thanks for sharing this bro it's very explanatory

This video is worth its weight in gold! Thanks a lot for sharing this info. I’ve been wanting to know this process since I started 3D art in 2017... When you are working on the low poly retopo, do you subdivide/smooth to get the more refined, higher poly version, or is that just adding more polys manually?

Cheers! Great video guys. explaining whole process beautifully. At one point I'm lost though. You said and I know that Substance Painter doesn't support multiple UV maps on single model. That's why I always use a single UV map or multiple parts for single model. But in this video you guys create multiple UV maps and import it on Painter and Painter behaves like it's a single UV map. So is there an additional step I'm not aware of or what?

Bless you guys!

I just spend the day retopologizing at work a sculpt I also did xD Displace and normals from zbrush work great so time for some substance painter!!! So kind of good timing x)

Nice overview, thanks for sharing guys. Regarding Maya's performance when doing retop, it's worth coming out of quad draw every once in a while and clearing your history - it really speeds things up.

Thank you so much

Helped a lot thanks :)

17:15 retopo

just one question, if im working on hardsurface model with some smaller surface details , can the displacement project those details onto a low poly version accurately? or do i need to retopo those small details roughly?

Thanks for your help and i have to tell us, you are very nice people and very clear !! I hope you continue ever an ever.. Super Kanal !!!!

I just found a golden channel

i um was not aware - i retoppod after I finished the final model but it worked out fine thankfully 😅

This is wonderful!

Amazing video. Ive been looking for a more structured workflow. Do you have any suggestions for a more cost effective alternative to sub paint?

3 Years into the future Substance painter supports UDIMS, great video guys keep em coming.

thanku so much sir .

Bless this channel

thanks for this video, good and neccesary informations to know!

Hey guys! First of all, I'd like to tell you that your tutorials are by far my favorites one (and I've seen a lot of them). The fact that you are two to comment makes the video twice as interesting. Otherwise I have two small questions about the workfow in studios. I often see in tutorials for software like Maya, people who fully modelize characters without using zbrush. Is this practice still common? Is there really an interest to sculpt characters or animals whitout zbrush? I have the feeling that it's much slower and outdated but I may be wrong. I also saw recently in one of your tutorials that you recommend to prepare the base mesh in a software like Modo to get real units and proportions. Is it a recommendation or is it the classic workflow of studios / professional world? Because in almost all modeling videos on zbrush I see artists starting with a simple sphere or zsphere. Anyway thank you for your free tutorials because it's also a lot of work ;)

Great video. Thanks for sharing :)

How detailed should the character be before you bring the retopo character into the substance painter? I ask because it looks pretty hi-res in painter in terms of the details. Btw, thank you for this helpful and informative tutorial.

Great videos guys! a question i have about the high poly, so you don't need to have things like the eyes, teeth, gums, tounge, maybe even eyesbrows modeled, those can be done in the lower poly. But in that case there wouldn't be any details that are tramsfered to them when baking right? just the rest of the body would have that?

Great. Its very helpfull

It would be nice digging deeper and learn how to deal with different parts of the face, like eyes or inside mouth. And maybe tips or advise dealing with blendshapes? They should be treated all as different objects cooked separatedly, but is there any proper way of not making the work many times for small changes?

Is it common to mirror for example the hands on the uv map to save space and give the face for example more uv space? Im talking about game design.

The projection step - is there a difference between importing the hi-rez into 3DSmax and then exporting it for baking in painter vs importing the lorez into Zbrush for projection and then exporting it to painter? Thank you

is concept sculpting better than sketching/drawing vice versa? just wondering

Good video,, the world of 3d is fascinating, sorry for my english ,,, greetings

Thank you about this

Guys, love you so much! Just switched from 2d to 3d and your videos are so fcking usefull. Big thanks to you!

Great Video! So when you are doing a hero character for film, you paint the low poly retopo mesh? What if you do a high end detailed character like Godzilla, i think then its necessary to see how the displacement map deforms the mesh to paint all the little details, right?

Hello! At time mark 37:39, you start to talk about production discussion to cover what comes before and after, lighting etc. have you done that yet? I recently began looking at some videos on peach fuzz creation and rendering. Would be good to hear from you where that comes in the pipeline for modeling and animation. Thanks!

Do you have a text version of the workflow available? For example Concept sculpt > retopologise etc and whether to do high res or low res sculpt first?

Wow nice i was looking right something similar

For texturing, what are your opinion on Quixel? yay or nay?

That's exactly what I was looking for to learn the pipeline. I'm a 2D artist who just started learning 3D and I have troubles with understanding the workflow.

Hello guys, nice tutorials all over your channel , i'm kinda new to it so , wow . I have a question that if you answer it will really save me from a stroke. What if you want to pose your game-ready character ? Is this something you do before the retopo process ( cuz i understand that this is going to be a pain in the ... in the afterwards process) , or is it something that you do after you have ended the symmetry - friendly whole process ( from modeling to texturing), by rigging it etc ? This is also a very time consuming process. I mean normally in a studio you would not do the pose , right ? It's only all about correct topo uvs and stuff , correct ? But if you want to show your work in a portfolio or something , I've seen that posing is an extra to have. So what is the correct - usual - less time consuming way to do it ? I haven't seen all your videos so i don't know if you have mention it anywhere, if so the link would also be appreciated. Cheers

Hey, guys and FlippedNormals! ^^ I am a Zbrush "cowboy" with below average skills, my workflow is to sculpt in Zbrush > Zremesh it > Project and work on subdivisions + make UVs in Zbrush > Export low & high poly into Substance + texturing > back to Zbrush to transpose character > export posed low poly & render in 3dsMax. Quick question, is there a way to eliminate or at least minimize texture stretching when transposing in zbrush? ^^

guys I love your videos, I have a question is really difficult to find a proper workflow for fur and hair, I mean you can find a lot of tutorials of how to make fur and Hair and that's not the real problem BUT there's almost no information about the proper placement in a production for fur and hair, for exmaple in maya if you make the fur in the hero character file, when you reference such character it looses the fur... the workflow I am doing right now is making the fur and hair in the render scene and export the ptex and groom information in case I need fur or hair in other render scenes, I find this wrong but is the only way I have found. thank you.

Fantastic. Every video I get more inspired. My main goal is modeling/sculpting, but everything looks great to be done makes me want to inject knowledge with a syringe. A question, could one start the modeling in Maya/Max and then export to ZBrush?

Can you do one on how to create characters for meta verse and if there are any differences in the approach?

why you can't use the low res from the base mesh you started working on, like in mudbox, is it cuz zbrush uses triangles? and does mudbox offer a better solution to this ? or is it just dead and this is a good thing lol

If you delete history when re-topoing with quad draw it will fix the lag temporarily until you need to delete history again.

Hi guys, could you potentially cover smaller details like texturing the eyes and teeth and switching between them and the main mesh on painter? It's just a small part of the process I'd like to understand better. Thanks.

The performance issue in maya is related to the history, script delete history and switch back to retopo tool and bob is your uncle . You can try to disable the history but I ran into some issues doing that.

Hi! Thank you for explaining all the process, you were perfectly clear. I have a question: at 19'13" we can see 5 edged polygons, I thought it was a very bad thing to do. Did you replaced them by 4 edged polygons or is it not that bad?

Thanks for the video! ~~~ Only I don't get it, In the end that ugly looking mesh after retopo is going to be the final character!? And that beautiful final sculpt, it's not going to look like that!?

Hey guys, i know that the eyes are on a different subtool on zbrush. Is it a separate export to other softwares? Then when we render, how do we join the body and eyes? Thanks!

cool retopo is my nemesis

Definitely from future here!

Hi guys I follow you since long ago and appreciate a lot your tuts, I keep coming back to this one, so I’m actually kind of watching it from the future even though I watched it in the past ;) any update on substance / Udims pls?. Thnx so much in advance.

Hey Henning and Morten, so with the latest versions of Zbrush, Maya, Substance painter, and their respective toolsets, nowadays how would something like a game ready character workflow look? So if I do the high res sculpt in zbrush, which software is more ideal for doing the Retopo? And then as for extracting and baking maps, which software would you use for that step because if i am not mistaken all of zbrush, substance painter and maya can do that? Thank you!

I don’t understand how you put together the high and low poly model…. How that whorks? Any help, thanks

I don't really understand much of the differences between painter and mari. What I got from it is that if painter added udim support and supported bigger maps, it would be pretty much interchangeable with mari, with the added benefit of having smart materials (which you can make yourself using substance designer) and some other features that make your life easier when texturing. Is that a good explanation or is this an oversimplification? I've wanted to try a film pipeline for some time because you can get much more detail and realism out of it, but I don't really get the difference to a gaming pipeline after the retopo and uv stage of things and I was afraid I couldn't get good results using painter for this kind of work.

What's UV smoothing? Are you talking about using the smooth UV tool in maya? Or relaxing the UVs somehow? I've never heard about smooth UVs outside of that. A second problem people can have with displacements that you are not mentioning (at least not from what I saw) is using the wrong scalar zero value. If the disp uses 0.5 as neutral your object will be bloated.

Hey guys, love your channel! I was just wondering if your paid tutorials are beginner friendly and easy to follow along (for example not using hotkeys without telling which tool that is and where it can be found, etc.) ?

I watched the video a few times! Really enjoyed the flow! I have some basic questions: If I understood the process - 1. sculpt to your heart's content (almost, as I learned in your projection video!); 2. export to, say Maya and re-topo; 3. make UV Udims; 4. Export re-topo'ed geo in zBrush; 5. sub-divide to ...say...a couple of millions of poly to do projection; 6. generate maps to be used in, say substance painter (I hear you on Udims). Now my questions: (a) although UVs where done in Maya at the lowest sub division level, right after retopo was done, artist doesn't need to do UVs again after subdivision/re-projection in zBrush, right? (b) If I heard it correctly, retopo'ed version will be used by riggers and animators to deform. Is that re-topo'ed lowest level, or retopo'ed after subdividing in zBrush and projecting all details back on it? I am guessing the former...but would love to hear the confirmation from the pros! If that is the case, does sub-divided /re-projected geo play any role in animation, or its life ends after maps were generated? I wonder though, when the camera is close to the face, and animator wants to use the clusters to move vertices to create expressions, will rigging on low poly geo transfer well on the detailed character? Would love to see some demo of such character acting someday! Anyways...thanks a lot for all your work!

For RETOPO, why can't we just use REMESH in Zbrush and then export anObj to MAYA for rigging? I just did a REMESH and exported an .Obj of a head that I was doing for Zbrush practice and the precision of the loops was far better than anything I could do with QUADDRAW in MAYA. At last for now until I get better at LOOP definitions in MAYA QUADDRAW. Great RU-vid channel!