Creating Animated Fantasy Scene with Intricate Characters in UE5

Introduction

My name is Marlene Lynn Beumker, and I’m a 3D Character Artist from Germany. I usually attribute my interest in game development and digital art to the original Guild Wars. I was a bit too young at the time to play the games properly, but running through the world and seeing the loading screens/concept art and great character models inspired me a lot and made me curious about what goes into game development.

Ultimately, it led me to go to Denmark to study Computer Graphic Arts at The Animation Workshop in 2020. Initially, I wanted to become a Character Concept Artist, but through the course, I discovered that I enjoy doing 3D a lot more. It’s a pleasant meeting point of artistic and logical elements. From sculpting to retopology and beyond, there’s always a puzzle to solve.

Since then, I contributed to Ashes Of Creation during my time as an intern at Intrepid Studios, and to several smaller projects through my freelance work, most notably to a German AR App called Trails Of Wonder. Midway through 2024, I decided to do a mentorship with Claudio Tumiati through the Think Tank Training Centre to improve my skills and portfolio, which you can find here.

Inspiration

Even though I considered multiple different concepts for the mentorship, from the get-go, I was in love with Yohann Schepacz’s work, so I settled on one of his designs. I think it’s important for 3D artists specifically to keep an open eye and seek out different types and styles of art; all the concepts I was considering had something different about them, and I made it a point to look for designs that felt fresh and a bit unusual.

With this concept in particular, I was drawn to the colors first, with its vibrant royal blues, and then to the costume design. It was hard to place cultural influences, and I think that intrigued me the most.

Yohann is great at creating interesting characters, not only in their design but also in the way they make you wonder about their history, culture, and surroundings. That’s why one of my main goals with the project was to establish Murmure and Seraphina as real, fully fleshed-out characters with a backstory and personality. I also aimed to improve my anatomical knowledge, so I spent a lot of time on the body despite it being mostly hidden in the final model.

Modeling

It feels redundant to say, but, as always, I started by collecting references followed by doing a block-out, trying to capture the overall vibe of the concept. Even though I knew I was going to simulate the clothing in Marvelous Designer, I wanted everything roughly in place first so I’d know what to aim for, but also to identify future challenges. 

This allows me to go deeper into research and collect further references to solve or prevent issues. Figuring out where things connect and overlap in ZBrush first makes the entire process of clothing simulation a lot easier later on.

Following my mentor’s advice, I also regularly tested the proportions and block-out meshes in Marmoset; seeing everything with shadows and with a more representative focal length/camera view kept my proportions accurate.

One of the processes I’d love to share is how I approached embroidery in sculpting.

I wanted to incorporate it in a way that allowed me to sculpt the cloth around it as it reacts to the tension and weight of the embroidery. I looked at a lot of goldwork as a reference and chose to approach the embroidery manually, starting by mapping out the shape of the embroidery with polypaint. Afterward, I traced the borders using a customized version of an embroidery brush that I added more depth to, achieving a tube-like shape. It requires some manual adjusting using the Move brush to get the flow just right but it is worth the hassle for big, chunky embroidery.

I also experimented with extracting patches from the underlying cloth and framing the mesh with the Curve brush, but I didn’t like the result in this specific case. With the borders finished, I added the inner embroidery, following the flow of the shape.

As a final step, I like randomly masking some of the polygroups and moving them around a bit to break up the otherwise even and repetitive shapes. I enjoyed approaching it this way, as it gave me more control when working on damage and disorder, adding elements of human error and storytelling. Even though this approach is harder to iterate on when compared to simply generating stitches during texturing, it leads to a more realistic and weighty result, especially for bigger embroidery.

The brushes I used are by Victor Franco and can be found here for free. I also like creating my own IMM brushes, such as chains and bigger ornaments. In the long run, it might save you some time on future projects and allow you to build a nice library across projects.

Topology

Having rigged and animated most of my previous characters, I knew to keep a few things in mind during retopology. When possible and logical I kept meshes continuous, this helps avoid having meshes clip or float apart during character movement. Another tip is maintaining the edge flow between meshes when layering them since it encourages more consistent deformation.

One of the tools that was very helpful during cloth retopology is this Maya plugin by Derrick Sesson.

Retopologizing clothing can be stressful, especially when it comes to garments with a lot of overlapping folds, like the sleeves in my project. With the tool, I got clean topology, but also easy and clean UVs.

I wrapped the body with ZWrap, using a base from the 3D Scan Store, so I got base textures for the face and hands from the get-go. Besides that, nobody can escape the standard Quad draw approach and manually unfolding and straightening shells where necessary.

With hard surface assets, such as the shoulder piece, it can be very helpful to keep the initial block out and use it as a base for the retopology.

Texturing

I started by combining the 3D Scan Store textures with the bakes I got from my sculpted face and hands, and then I started layering paint on the face. It felt important to consider how the face paint would be applied (with a brush or sponge) and to have different opacities depending on how many layers of paint have been applied. I was also interested in how, historically, someone would create blue pigment to use as makeup and decided to use Lapis lazuli as a point of reference. I used an anchor layer of the face without makeup to later add more cracks and areas where the makeup had worn off or faded more. Through my research, I found that to achieve a more historical feeling and realistic result, I needed patchy and unevenly distributed pigment, especially compared to today's standards regarding makeup.

As for the clothing, I split up all the different material types into folders and created base textures for each. Within each folder, when needed, I created subfolders for different parts of the clothing to add more precise detailing, such as additional folds, dirt, and sun damage.

Having a good base diffuse texture with plenty of natural color variation was very important, especially with the blue fabric considering how much of the character it covers.

A tip I read a while ago in the character art guide for DOTA 2 was to maintain a clear value hierarchy, having the darkest areas towards the feet of the character and then increasing the brightness and contrast towards the head. Yohann already took care of that with his concept, but it was still a good reminder to think about while texturing.

I almost immediately established a rendering scene in Marmoset 5 to be able to quickly test out my textures with ray tracing and a better lighting and shading setup.

The most challenging parts of the project were texturing and figuring out the shoulder cape element and the white fabric parts. I went back and forth a lot between different looks and levels of grime before finding the balance of clean and grimy that felt right. I knew I wanted the character to be well-traveled but also to have notably fine and expensive clothing. This somewhat solved the issue with the white fabric but still left me with the cape-related problems.

My main inspiration behind it was a metal Yúnjiān or cloud collar. Considering the placement on the body and the concept, I changed it to gold-painted leather cutouts with some decorative coins and rope. My initial version ended up too flat, lacking surface detail overall. This stage taught me how important it is to iterate and even discard previous work when it’s not working as intended, sometimes fixing something takes longer than doing it from scratch.

Regarding Seraphina (the big cat), I wanted to be efficient, so I focused on the areas that would be visible after covering her up with the blanket/dress. I made a quick XGen groom in Maya to bake in the shorter hairs and combined that with the bake from the sculpt. Afterward, I focused on bigger color changes and on adding a lot of depth to the albedo. I knew I was going to cover most of it with the fur cards, so the roughness information, while still important, was secondary.
Using this multi UV-Set workflow, I was able to reuse the body albedo for the fur cards.

Unreal Engine Scene

My initial inspiration behind the scene was the movie Hero (2002), which has a lot of great monochromatic shots. I knew I wanted to present my work in Unreal Engine 5 to take advantage of Lumen, so most of the heavy lifting was done by the standard environment light components, such as the Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light, and Directional Light. To get a more cinematic feeling I also added an Atmospheric Height Fog to the scene and some fog cards.

After setting up the base lighting and the main scene components, I blocked out the animation and set up the cameras. It was important to get the first iterations of everything done quickly, especially the camera shots and movements. This made it easy to know what to focus on and also allowed for shot-specific set-dressing and lighting. I almost exclusively use spotlights and rectangular area lights in my projects.

For post-processing, I used DaVinci Resolve and focused on basic color grading and improving the cuts I set up in the Unreal Engine Sequencer.

Conclusion

I started this project in October 2024 and fully finished it in early March 2025, so around five months, excluding the winter holidays, when I took a break from work. Long-term projects can be a challenge, but having my mentor’s regular feedback and the support of my fellow Think Tank students kept me consistent and motivated. The areas in which I grew the most were organic sculpting and presentation. Claudio Tumiati is an amazing sculptor, and his guidance was an invaluable resource.

My advice for beginning artists would be to find a community of like-minded artists to work alongside with. Especially when starting out, making 3D art can be filled with frustrating roadblocks and pitfalls, but even more so when you have to deal with them on your own.

I would also recommend experiencing at least a bit of every part of the pipeline! Rigging and animating my models has been very insightful when it comes to figuring out how to do proper retopology (and it’s surprisingly fun!). Most of all I want to recommend working on concepts and models you enjoy! I know my work is always better when I love the concept.

Lastly, it is so important to seek out feedback! Most people in this industry are super kind and willing to help out when you message them. As long as you’re respectful of their time and come prepared with specific questions, there’s always someone who can lend a hand or an eye.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to write this article! I also want to give a big shoutout to my friend Aitziber Azkue, who helped me edit this and who has been a great source of inspiration and motivation to me ever since meeting her. :)

Marlene Lynn Beumker, 3D Character Artist