Creating Stylized Characters - in-Depth Tutorial Course

Stylized Character Creation Course
Learn from Florian Neumann - a professional character artist in this in-depth tutorial course on Stylized Character Creation. This course showcases the entire process from start to finish on how to create stylized characters. 

2024 UPDATE – This course has received a large update in 2024. Here we have added various polish chapters on polishing sculpting, textures and posing along with additional source files. These chapters do not cover any new workflows and are therefor not narrated.

Concept by Andre Mealha

Maya, Zbrush, Substance Painter, and Marmoset Toolbag 4
During this course, you'll learn how to create stylized 3D characters using various industry-standard software packages. Modeling and UV mapping will be carried out in Maya.

However, the techniques used are universal and can be applied to other 3D modeling software as well. Sculpting will be done in Zbrush and Baking+Rendering will be done in Marmoset Toolbag, Texturing will be done in Substance Painter. We'll also create a simple rig for posing, which we'll adjust in Maya and Blender. 

By the end of this course, you'll have learned all the techniques necessary to create high-quality stylized characters like those you see in the images and trailers. These techniques are universal and can be applied to almost any character.

22+ HOURS!
This course is packed with over 22+ hours of valuable content. You'll be able to follow along with every step of the process, as we guide you through each stage of creating a high-quality character. Please note that some of the more repetitive tasks will be time-lapsed, 

Please note: This course has been greatly updated since it was first created. This means that you will need to follow the bonus chapters in order to get to the quality level as shown in the images.

We will start by creating our blockout and base shapes in Maya. We will then prepare the mesh and start creating a high poly version using both Maya and Zbrush. Once that is done with will create/polish the low poly version and do our UV Unwrapping.

Finally we will clean-up our scene and prepare for baking.
Baking will be done using marmoset Toolbag and we will texture our character using Substance Painter.
Finally we will auto-rig and pose our character. At which point we will create the final renders in Marmoset Toolbag.

BONUS

As mentioned above we have added a lot of bonus chapters. These chapters will cover some face polish sculpting in Zbrush, fixing and improving some areas of the character and re-baking our textures. After that we will showcase how to polish the textures some more. We will finish things of with an improved rig and posing.

By the end of the course, you'll have gained a wealth of knowledge and skills that you can apply to creating high-quality characters.

SKILL LEVEL
This game art tutorial is designed for students who have some experience with 3D modeling tools like Maya, Substance Painter, and Zbrush. While we will explain everything in detail, if you've never used any modeling or texturing tools before, we recommend that you first watch an introductory tutorial on those programs. You can find many of these tutorials for free on YouTube, or paid ones on this very website.

TOOLS USED

• Maya
• Zbrush
• Marmoset Toolbag 4
• Substance 3D Painter
• Blender

YOUR INSTRUCTOR
Florian Neumann is a lead character artist working at RABCAT. He has contributed to various large scale projects like Apec legends, Forza Horizon, Overwatch 2 and many more.

CHAPTER SORTING
There’s a total of 44 videos and 4 bonus videos split into easy-to-digest chapters.
All the videos will have logical naming and are numbered to make it easy to find exactly the ones you want to follow.

SUBTITLES
Subtitles are offered for this tutorial in English, Chinese and Spanish.
Please note the subtitles are auto generated and might not always be 100% accurate.