Ahmad Soltani gave some details on the way he’s built his real-time Gangsta character with the help of UE4, Substance Painter and ZBrush.
Hi, my name is Ahmad Soltani and I’m a freelance character artist from Afghanistan. I love playing video games and that’s the main reason I got into the game industry, especially making characters.
The concept behind this project was to get a realistic result in UE4 and it was really a challenge for me since I got tired of Marmoset!
I used a base mesh that exists inside of ZBrush (Nicks_HumanMale) and then started sculpting and for fine details, I used Texturing.xyz maps!
For shaders, I’ve tried to make my own ones but for texturing, I’ve used Substance Painter. For the skin texture, first, I used a couple of high-res images from the internet, then started projecting them in ZBrush and imported in Substance Painter and added what was needed, like Specular, Glossiness, etc.
For those small pores, I applied two different 512 tileable normal maps and used them in my shader but I needed to make masks for them.
6-the rendering part was a little bit challenging since I don’t know much about UE4 (I’m new to it) but I took some time and read the articles on UE4 websites. I searched a lot for some shots from movies since I needed some references on cinematic lighting.