Sculpting Destiny-Style Characters in ZBrush & Substance

Eduard Oliver gave a little talk on the way he created his Casmir character using ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Marmoset Toolbag.

Intro

My name is Eduardo Oliveira, and I live in Brazil – São Paulo. I started designing when I started playing some games of the season online. I am currently working in the area of games as a character artist. I have worked on Evasion, a VR game. There are others that have not been published, but unfortunately, I cannot talk about them due to NDA.

Casmir

I wanted to do Casmir because of an interesting and aesthetic concept behind it (this concept was made by Jarold Sng and Sergey Vasnev). The references that I used are from games similar to the concept like Destiny, Titanfall, and others that has this style.

The main sculpt always starts from a sketch, first I need to find the shape and silhouette of the character, usually start with a basic shape (sphere), pulling and modeling.

Many of the character’s parts are symmetrical, and I use symmetry to save time. The biggest challenges is about finding the right shape, silhouette, and everything that makes the project look aesthetic.

I made the textures in Substance Painter, starting with basic colors and adding variations, dirt and wear for more details. For personal work, I like to create everything, observing and comparing the materials to achieve the best result.

The lenses were made with separate materials, to obtain a better refractive and transparency result using the Marmoset preset and playing with the material values. I always start with some Sky light to get the reflections of the environment, then I add KeyLight, RimLight and FillLight.

For the rendering part, I used Marmoset Toolbag. I just painted the textures that determine how materials react to light.

Eduard Oliver, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev

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