Software used: Nomad Sculpt, Blender, Unity

Skills used: sculpting, retopology, hard surface modeling, UV unwrapping, rigging, texture painting, animation

Meet Misha! The eldest daughter of two blacksmiths, she's the responsible role model to her brother Milo. She tends to be stubborn and close-minded, but she's working on opening up! She'd do anything to keep her younger brother happy and healthy.

I had a few goals for this character. The first was to learn how to make hand-painted textures (I had never completed a hand-painted character before this). I really enjoyed the painting process and the control that comes with this workflow, but texturing it solely in Blender was a huge challenge. I'm looking forward to hand-painting more characters in Substance Painter or 3DCoat.

My second goal was to keep the polycount and texture size as low as possible. I used strategic mirroring of UV shells and highly optimized topology to achieve this goal. The resulting model contains only 8,027 tris and uses just one 1k texture.

Misha is a proof-of-concept character meant to help define the character creation process for Artifice, so my final goal was to experiment with techniques and software to determine the right approach for production.

I had a lot of fun rigging this character. There's a one-minute demo of the controls I made on my YouTube.

I documented most of the process building this character. You can view my notes on Notion by clicking the link below.