#developmentprojects

Texturing

I imported my ambient occlusion, curvature and normal maps into Substance Painter from Marmoset, and then started to block out my base colours - primarily adding shading from the AO before moving onto hand painting details. I’m aiming for recreating Arcane’s painterly details with this model, and started by creating planular forms on the face.

Rendering

I wanted to move my model into Marmoset Toolbag early to see my textures in alternative lighting, and the desired pose. Once I had my base colours and started a rough layer of hand painting, I posed my model in Maya, without rigging her, and set up simple lighting of one directional main, a bounce and rim light, to give her some form. From this quick set up I most obviously noticed the shadows of her outfits causing issues, as well as stark AO lines on the clothing. 

I came across another helpful article on creating textures in Arcane’s style, the turn table screenshots are really clear references for me.

I really enjoyed the direction this model was heading in though, and was very happy with the progress I had made so far. There are notable areas that need improving, and I barely got started with creating hand painted textures. I really look forward to finishing her off, and wish I had planned my time better to not spend so much time making small changes to my Development Project 1’s optimisation, and getting cracking on large changes to my Development Project 2.

References

Baking

For this project I wanted to learn baking within Marmoset Toolbag 5, rather than using Substance Painter. Without the need for precise naming conventions it definitely saved me some time doing it this way, and I enjoyed learning a new skill of creating the maps separately before importing them into substance painter for texturing.The ambient occlusion results were softer then the standard for Substance Painter, and consequently this method is definitely something I’m interested in trying again.

Retop

My last project took a considerable amount of time to retop everything by hand, so this time around I attempted to speed up the process by doing some of the retop in Zbrush. I Zremeshed some of the items, and used the lowest subdivision levels for others. When creating my sculpt I started with clean low poly topology, which definitely helped in my favour at this stage, when creating the lowpoly. I re-toped the hands and face by hand to get specific deformable topology, and the hat, since its unusual shape meant getting a Zremesh version that wasn’t spiraling was proving difficult. I then cleaned up the Zremeshes, adding extra loops to improve form, and optimising. 

For material allocation, I separated my model into face, hands, hair, eyes, and then two extra texture sheets for the clothing and accessories. I could have combined the face and hands onto one texture map, but I wanted more control over the face details staying sharp. I kept the strands of the hair separate to gain a cleaner bake, and improve the animation potential.

potential. 

Sculpting

In starting my second development project, unfortunately I hadn’t left myself with a great deal of time in comparison to my first project. I started off by improving my sculpt from assignment 6, competitions, in Zbrush to bring the bust I had so far to a more comprehensive level. With this project, I aimed to use Fortiche’s Netflix TV show, Arcane as reference, and heavily used their sculpts and textures as the goal for level of detail and form.

I spent a long time in the sculpting process trying to get the shape of the hat looking correct, and ended up splitting it up into several pieces to create the form I was after. I continued to use Zbrush for the clothes rather than marvelous designer, due to the stylistic, simple exaggerated forms I wanted to achieve. In terms of the clothing folds, Ladislas Gueros’ work on Arcane’s sculpts created subtle volumes, rather than simply indenting the area with the dam standard brush. I used her work as heavy reference when improving upon the clothing for my sculpt, and I feel I have a much stronger idea of how fabric deforms around a bod by studying her bust sculpts.

On finalising the model, I cut out the torn sections of the clothes, decimated and moved to Maya to prepare to retop

Research

While doing further research into Arcane’s texture, I came across some realtime characters by Pavel Marchankau. I hadn’t seen work like this done before, especially real time characters, and I was thrilled to see he’d created some 80Level articles about his workflow:

The selection of characters were created for an indie project, Bagna, and feature a very effective smudge effect in his renders, which was what originally caught my attention. The skin texturing was what interested me the most about his characters, appearing like a Van Gough oil painting, and Marchankau’s exaggerated colours have provided me with inspiration for creating forms. He completed all his textures within Substance Painter, which made me very excited to try his approach, as opposed to several other artists I’d looked at who used 3D Coat. He frequently used the smudge brush to blend his fill layers of separate colours, which is something I am excited to try with this project. 

Hair

Spending most of my time analysing the arcane sculpt models at this stage, it took me a while to realise that they are simply blockouts for the hair, the final rendered characters use haircards. While I am worried I won’t have enough time to explore haircards for my model, it is definitely something I’m interested in improving.

Alternatively, Ulysse Soubiran creates a beautiful Arcane inspired bust sculpt, with hand painted sculpted hair, achieving a beautiful result. This is likely much more realistic to try to achieve with this project.I particularly like the effect of light on the hair, the impressionistic brush stroke feel with a square brush keeps a painterly vibe. 

Particularly noticeable aspects of this interview with JHill, was that Ulysse created this bust purely with Zbrush polypaint. He also makes use of subsurface scattering in the final render within Marmoset, which really softens the render shadows, which will be useful to experiment with myself at that stage.

References

Collins, E (2025) Check Out This Game-Ready Character with Complex Texturing. Available at: https://80.lv/articles/modeling-an-assassin-using-zbrush-substance-3d-painter-xgen (Accessed: 18 January 2026).

Marchankau, P (2023) Modeling an Assassin Using ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter & XGen. Available at: https://80.lv/articles/modeling-an-assassin-using-zbrush-substance-3d-painter-xgen (Accessed: 18 January 2026).

Learning

To improve my Marmoset Render, I further adjusted the skin weights of my character, and made some final tweaks to the pose in Maya. I then explored a few articles on Marmoset’s posts by Gabriel Lopes and Yulia Sokolova. They both talk about tips for presenting stylised characters in Marmoset Toolbag, to push the lighting and post effects, utilising a variety of colours to amplify form and stylisation.

Rendering

Ellie and Puff (I have now decided on a name for the pair), came to 44k Tris, with 4 2k texture maps (Clothes, Hair, Skin, and Accessories), and 2 1ks (Puff and Eyes). I added a small amount of subsurface scattering for Ellie and Puff's skin, although I didn't think it made too much of a difference, as I kept it very subtle. I was very happy with the gloss effect I achieved on Ellie's eye, and so I added a similar layer to Puff, to kept coherence between the two characters and matched the references better.

I lowered the saturation slightly of my model in the post processing, and mostly increased the ambient lighting to try and make a flattering environment, rather than more dynamic lighting. I also changed the background of the scene to something more neutral, after trying several variations that contrasted less with my character, as I didn’t feel like the previous background was working, despite being the original concept. 

After that I added a finishing touch of Puff’s fire - a simple plane with a low resolution texture, with a gentle emissive.

I prepared portfolio images of the wireframe and breakdown of the model’s textures, turn arounds and close up renders. I would have liked to have created a little breathing animation, for both Ellie and Puff, however I ran out of time, and was already over due starting my second development project. I was happy with how Ellie came out though, and felt I improved my sculpting and texturing skills to produce a cleaner result.

When creating my breakdowns for Artstation and my portfolio, I was particularly using Sam Bang's work as reference as to how he effectively presents his skills. In particular I liked the way he broke down his materials with The Healer - Grand Space Opera: Light Age, which was my inspiration for the layout: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aY4YQq

Feedback

To finalise I posted my work on Artstation to build up my portfolio and online presence, and requested feedback on Polycount to improve her further. I received some really useful advice from Fabi_G, who noted that the surface textures needed further improvement, specifically adding higher gloss and SS on the skin and teeth, more pronounced colour zones with the skin, and some anistrophic reflections on the hair, and lower opacity on the glasses. I agree with all of these points, and are easy changes to make with how I have set her up within Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag, and I look forward to seeing the improved results taking this feedback into account.

My final renders

Wireframe

Material breakdown

Maya Wireframe and Polly Count

Thank you!

References

Bang, T (no date) The Healer - Grand Space Opera: Light Age. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aY4YQq (Accessed: 2 Jan. 2026).

Sokolova, Y (no date) Stylized Character Presentation in Toolbag. Available at:https://marmoset.co/posts/stylized-character-presentation-in-toolbag/ (Accessed: 2 Jan. 2026)

3D print

Now I was nearing completion for my first development project, I wanted to refer back to the original brief of creating something 3D printable - since this character concept was initially chosen to be printed. So once again I posed her high poly in Zbrush - this time using the Tpose function for a much more efficient, and less destructive workflow - using her most recent, final sculpt. I then dynameshed most of the model in sections, deleting the inner faces for a less layered and water tight mesh, and decimated down to approximately 1million polys. 

I planned on using a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon printer, using a PLA material for this print. Trying in medium grey colour, being the best for painting over after.

I made a few iterations of her posed sculpt, to try and get a version to print without supports, angling her hand and her hair so the printer has a surface to build up off. However, I ran into a few issues doing it this way, and it became clear I would need some support, or to separate my model into sections to print separately, as there was just too much overhang.

The first print had some issues with one of her legs, likely due to me not combining the meshes of her skin and trousers together well enough, as the printer didn’t register the file part as printable. However I did the same process for both of the legs, so not entirely sure what was specifically wrong, but I remeshed both of them anyway. Once I fixed this, combining more of my subtools, and deciding to use default ‘tree supports’, the next print worked much better! Although I think the simple pair of her feet from the failed print are kind of neat!

The new print with tree supports had issues around the bottom of the ponytail hair region, where the filament stopped sticking together. I cancelled the print after it was spaghettiying in mid air. It also printed the top of the dungarees very thinly, which got ripped off with the removal of the supports. This could be fixed next time by combining it with the mesh of the top, to reduce the amount of inside geometry.

On the whole, this second print did okay, but a combination of issues with my model, and the type of supports I used resulted in failure. There were also several holes in her clothing, likely where the inside of my mesh touched too closely with the outside. So before printing again, I tried to fix these issues in Zbrush, inflating my mesh where the problem areas were, adjusting the position of her ponytail to give it its own support, and thickening some of the thin parts of the model to make them sturdier.

I tried to use the ‘default/normal’ support for this next print, which managed to print my entire character without any obvious errors, as well printing the model to be more dense, so she hopefully won’t snap off with the supports. Although there are a lot more areas of contact with the model, and so will likely have lots more scaring when the new supports are removed.

After removing the supports, the model was not consistently ‘clean’ underneath, so I spent time sanding her down, to create some smoother surfaces around the poorer printed areas (which ended up being most of the model), but especially around the face area, she looked like distressed denim.

When removing the numerous supports, I did pull off some more of the flimsier bits of my character. Again the top of the dungarees, a few fingers, glass frames, dungaree strap, and some of the loose hair strands. Although there were less holes in the clothing, there did still end up being a few, which I also needed to fill in before painting. To fix this, instead of printing again, I did some research on how to patch up 3D printed models, and was suggested ‘the green stuff’, which hardens well, sticks to PVC material, and is easily paintable. This ended up being very difficult to mold by hand, and although I created some smooth surfaces on the holes in the clothes, the sculpted results I replaced with snapped off sections, were not as good as my original model.

After practically printing my character, and seeing where the errors resulted in, I definitely learnt a lot about how this 3d printer manages to create the forms, and I feel much more confident on how to avoid the error areas in the future projects.

After the green stuff had dried, I did several rounds of spraying my model with a painting primer, to mattify the texture and give myself a good surface to paint off.

References

Bambu Lab (2025) Bambu Studio (2.3.0) [Computer program]. Availability OR Available at: https://bambulab.com/en-gb/download (Accessed: 20 December 2025).

To continue my development, I worked on creating the parallax effect I looked at previously from Sitompul, by bringing the pupil geometry inwards and creating a transparent glossy layer where the rest of the circular eye would be. I need a bit more work on this shiny material, but the depth works well for now.

I tried to study project dragon characters in a bit more detail to work out how and where they use their roughness maps, as my initial render wasn’t looking as shiny as theirs, and I wasn’t super sure how much gloss or roughness they used.

Their characters have a soft gentle shine on their clothing, meaning they definitely use roughness maps to an extent, so I’ve made some very simple roughness textures, as I don’t want to add too much noise, made simply from my curvature and AO maps, with varying levels of values for different materials. The hair is definitely shinier than the skin on their works, with some directional maps to help the believability, which would be great to add to her ponytail if I have time. I can’t detect much noise on the example models, everything seems consistently smooth, and so I didn’t want to overwork her. 

These were the resulting roughness maps ^

After fixing errors on the rigged model, I did a final Ngon Checker on the model after posing her, which was a bit late in the process. I brought my finished posed character into Marmoset Toolbag, for some additional renders, to try and get some different effects. This was an iterative process as every time I brought her into engine I noticed more errors that I went back and fixed. Same goes for the texture sheets. The final rigged posed model ^

In Marmoset I noticed a few errors on the AO maps, which I fixed by hand in photopea, especially round the hair band, and the plaster on her face. This was primarily affecting the shadows on the final render, but also creating some slightly unintended effects 

Above is an early test render from marmoset, the issues with the skinning especially round the right arm are very prominent in this shot. I was purely working with the concept image to construct this pose, but I then realised that human hands can't actually go back as far as I have posed her right hand, so I took a picture of myself to use as additional reference. This was helpful to me, as I had a better understanding of how I had maneuvered myself into the required position. In addition to this, my main light is too intense, which has blown out most of the hair details, so I need to adjust the lighting strength.

Here is a second iterative result of adjusting lights after watching a few videos on good lighting techniques in marmoset. All The Secrets For a Strong Render✅ Marmoset Toolbag 5, by Hafez Yadollahi was very useful for cinematic rendering, and post edits to my renders. Real-time Render in Marmoset Toolbag 4 - Helen of Troy, was useful for the step by step lights they placed to render a more stylised character. Both of these two videos heavily used the HDRIs for general illumination of their model, where previously I had primarily been using spot lights. I'm aiming for more balanced lighting all round, less realistic with one or two light sources, but illuminating the model more uniformly. So I changed up my lighting and upped a soft purple tinged HDRI, a default in Marmoet, and lowered my spotlights on my character. That partnered with increasing some ambient occlusions in marmoset, reducing the number of lights casting shadows, and upping my materials to Ray tracing, has given me a much nicer result. I do wonder if I've gone a bit too heavy on the AO at this stage though, as it is especially dark around her thighs, drawing more attention than desired.

I found this video very interesting on how to create a good looking cell shader in unity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQhdbH8O7Oc&list=PLbNPlYeHWqEYxJfm99-2w_45yHa32J17f. Unfortunately I ran out of time to implement it alongside my materials, as I would have loved to experiment with giving my character some black outlines, to see how that affected her mood. I am tempted to explore Cell shading rendering - if time to see how it looks, and whether I want to adapt my base texture with hand painted outlines to assist the cell shaded feel, or keep to Project Dragon’s PBR style.

After this I did a final substance painter work through, where I added details to the eye textures, which had been neglected, and then exported my final maps for engine.

Final maps from substance painter, Base colour, Normal, Roughness, Metalness, Opacity and Occlusion. I didn't pack these maps for Unreal Engine for better viewing purposes, and ease of hooking into Marmoset Toolbag 5.

References

Your Sandbox (2022) Advanced Cel-Shader in UE4/UE5. Downloads for Patrons. 9 April. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQhdbH8O7Oc&list=PLbNPlYeHWqEYxJfm99-2w_45yHa32J17f (Accessed: 26 December 2025).

Hafez Yadollahi (2025) All The Secrets For a Strong Render✅ Marmoset Toolbag 5. 15 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYdhqxpivoc (Accessed: 30 December 2025).

Marmoset (2026) Marmoset Toolbag 5 (5.02) [Computer program]. Available at: https://marmoset.co/#dltoolbag (Accessed: 30 December 2025)

Kutskir, T (2025) Photopea. Available at: https://www.photopea.com/ (Accessed: 17 November 2025).

Further render adjustments

After fixing the issues with my skinning, I moved back to substance painter to improve the materials, now I could see them iteratively lit well.

Back to texturing

I watched this really interesting video from Weston Reid, on J Hill’s Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHxO-Owtxns, about the progress for their stylised hand painted western character. This gave me a lot to think about while continuing texturing my model. In particular, pushing the greyscale values of the base colour, which is definitely an area I forget about. So, I adjusted the lighting settings in substance painter, and turned my viewport to greyscale, while I adjusted the colours on my AO and curvature maps for each material, to make it more impactful. I wanted to ensure my values were working consistently, before going back to colour.

I added additional details present on the concept, with the Chinese writing on her legs, notes on her bag, and dirt round her body. For this I used the default Substance Painter’s Ink Brush. I had tried to generate the dirt within Substance Painter, but the effect wasn’t stylised enough, or well composed, and I was much happier with the results of me drawing the dirt by hand. After painting it on, I added a few simple gradients to improve the values, to have greater contrast on the greyscale. I did add a few specs of dirt to her legs, face and hands, since I thought it odd where the dirt was currently placed on her, with regards to messy children activities. But sticking to the concept, as a reimagined 3D piece was my intention, so I ended up removing it.

I was curious what the Chinese writing on her legs said, so I translated it, which came out as simply meaning ‘shoe’, with an arrow to her foot, which I found rather comical!

Paying special attention to the values has really noticeably visually improved my model, and greatly impacted the stylisation impact. During this part of the development, I also changed the most saturated areas to be at the top of my character, and desaturated at the base. I lowered the values for the whites of the shoes, and the saturation, to try and bring the focus back up to the top of my character, having both a value and saturation decrease away from the face.

While continuing to then hand paint my model with colour, I constantly went back to the greyscale view to check my values as I went, this was some really great advice for improving my base colours. I added some additional shadows, emphasising the AO in some areas that would benefit from more depth, and heavier stylisation. Such as skin shadows under the shirt, shadows from her shorts, and shadows on her shirt under her dungarees.

I worked through the different objects of my model, hand painting them one by one, initially going a bit heavy with the exaggeration of colours and strokes, then blurring and lowering the opacity afterwards for a more subtle look. I played around with a variety of colours and values with the hair, to see what complemented her the most. I ended up going with quite a lot of variety in the colours for a high amount of depth and visual interest, particularly referring to a head sculpt by Mandy Waning for Project Dragon.

The style of project dragon doesn’t have any obvious brush strokes, being similar to WoW style, with the addition of pbr, reacting to the environment.

The video with Reid also suggested decimating the model completely before exporting to Maya for retopologising, speeding up future processes. I had done that partially for this model due to trial and error when retopologising within Maya’s quad draw tool, but I intend to decimate my entire model before moving to Maya for my next character, trying it as a new workflow. They also suggested baking in marmoset, which I am interested in trying out for my next project. Since this saves lots of time not fussing with naming conventions for baking in Substance Painter.

Looking back at Sitompul’s article, after posing their character, they did another AO pass, in addition to the substance painter bake. Since I only intend my model to be viewed in the original conceived pose, I thought it would be a good idea to add another AO pass around the side body, where the arms are tucked in. Also under the dungarees, and other areas that would be affected.

From reading and watching interviews with other stylised hand painted artists, it appears that 3D Coat is the go-to software for hand painted textures, with its multi layered approach being very similar to photoshop, the ability to blend and merge layers. However, currently being familiar with substance painter, and hoping for mostly a PBR result, I thought substance painter was best to continue with.

I was quite happy with the results of my hand painted textures at this stage, and I became fairly tempted to create her as a diffuse only textured model, since I have enough detail and information in the base colours alone to indicate the shadows and highlights. However, the project dragon has basic rough and metallic maps, and so I may create two renders in the engine, to see which one works best. 

After I was pretty happy with my texture results, I took some screen shots in substance painter’s iRay, with some basic lighting to mark the milestone.

References

Sitompul, M. (2019) How To Create Your Own Hand-Painted 3D Characters Available at: https://discover.therookies.co/2019/07/21/how-to-create-your-own-hand-painted-3d-characters/. (Accessed: 8 December).

Airborn Studios (no date) Airborn Studios Portfolio Project Dragon. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/airbornstudios/albums/13589430 (Accessed: 5 December 2025)

J Hill (2025) The Secret to Hand-Painted | Pixel Peeps Weston Reid. 12 Sep. Available at: ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHxO-Owtxns (Accessed: 12 December 2025).