Creating Stylized Characters for Production

Discover how to create a production-ready stylized character from a concept, complete with tips for presenting the final result as a high-quality portfolio piece. Carol Cornils reveals her complete process for sculpting stylized characters with personality and shares her methods for applying traditional art concepts to her 3D workflow. She also offers her personal advice for helping to make your characters stand out in your portfolio.

This is an intermediate-level workshop that expects some knowledge of ZBrush, Maya, and Substance Painter. For those new to blocking in characters, Caros shares her own process more clearly for beginners to follow along.

This workshop includes how Carol utilizes Zremesher and topology to create crisp and clean surfaces, as well as how to create geometry hair brushes with easy UVs. She also shares her own material-mixing techniques with Substance Painter for convincing stylized characters.

Throughout the workshop, Carol reveals the methods and shortcuts that she uses in her daily workflow to find and unleash the appeal in character designs. Her helpful tips can also be applied to other modeling styles. By completing this workshop, you should have developed some techniques and shortcuts that can help to speed up your own character design and creation workflow.

Carol is providing several files with this workshop, including the blocked-phase Monkey, the production model with 1k texture sets, and the high-topology version that she uses for baking; you’ll also find a Maya file with the shader setup that she uses for rendering. These files are designed to give you the opportunity to study Carol’s choices and help you troubleshoot your own work along the way.

The original concept featured in this workshop is by Diego Oliva Monardes.