Nikita Svechnikov showed his character workflow: sculpt, props, cloth, feathers, Substance Painter workflow, and rendering in Keyshot.
Hi! I’m Nikita Svechnikov. I’m from Ukraine. First, I worked as a freelancer and now for about 5 years, I’ve been an art lead in a small mobile game studio in St. Petersburg.
I didn’t get any professional education. When I was a child I went to a traditional art school and learned some basics which is still very useful. There were no additional courses or schools for game art so I just read and watched lots of tutorials online. Considering the style, I like both cartoon and realistic stuff. And now I’m trying to learn more about anatomy and material details to improve realistic skills.
First I’m looking for a 2D concepts that I would like to see in 3D. Forest Nymph was inspired by Anna Davinscourt’s amazing concept. While working in ZBrush I mostly focused on shapes. Leaves make great directional lines for the whole picture, and my main goal was to keep the flow of these beautiful shapes. I made a couple of curve brushes with different types of leaves and then just placed them to the right areas. Then I defined each of them with the Move brush.
For the Native American character, my main goal was to make something qualitative, detailed and comprehensive. This work pushed me out of my comfort zone because I don’t like to concentrate on details. For props for this particular project, I looked at lots of works of great traditional artist such as Zhou Shu Liang, who specializes in tribe native American art.
It inspired me to recreate a kind of a shaman ritual scene, so I did some sculpts of a drum, bird skulls, and other artifacts. For rocks and tree trunks I used Quixel Megascan library.
For the clothes, I used Marvelous Designer. I watched a talk by Guerilla Games at ZBrush Summit in which they tell in a very basic and detailed way how to sculpt leather. I think the video is super useful for understanding the difference between fabric materials.
For feathers, I used ZBrush Fibermesh.
I really like Substance Painter and I make all the textures and bakes in it, even hand-painted. Baked Light Filter helps to save a lot of time and not to draw the shadows with your hands – very helpful for mobile assets. I also use it on PBR setup with low opacity to receive more volume and depth.
Usually, I start with baking all the textures. I like to use Match By Suffix where your low poly meshes use suffix _low and high poly suffix _high to bake everything in one step without overlapping. To set suffixes I export all high poly meshes from ZBrush to 3ds Max. Also, I assign all the materials in Max to get the ID map by mesh color in Substance.
Then I start texturing by rolling through the built-in smart material library or try to find missing ones on Substance Share. Then I adjust them for my needs.
For my cartoonish projects, I used Keyshot. I try to create them as fast as possible so I sculpt the characters only for one camera angle and don’t use UVs. ZBrush to Keyshot Bridge feature is a super great and fast way to render models with good quality keeping ZBrush matcap and polypaint. First, I set up the matcaps and choose Group By Materials in ZBrush Bridge settings to easily control materials in Keyshot with etch re-import. Then I adjust materials in Keyshot. I especially like the translucent material type and try to use it as much as possible.
Then I set up the light with HDRI Editor or add meshes with light materials.
For the game characters, I use Marmoset Toolbag.
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