The Main Character Process

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share a breakdown of the character creation pipeline I worked on. This has been a full process from sculpting to animation-ready character in Unity — using tools like Blender 4.4, ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Unity 6000. Here’s how it went!

I started in Blender by blocking out the base mesh. I kept the geometry simple and symmetrical, making sure I had good edge flow before going into sculpting. Then I created clothing for the model and used sculpting tools to refine and add detail specifically when creating the characters hair.

After sculpting, I started retopology. Clean quads were important since I planned to animate the character later in Unity. Once retopo was done, I:

• UV unwrapped each mesh (body, clothes, eyes, hair, etc.)

• Made sure shells were clean and unstacked for texturing

• Snapped critical UV islands (like the soles of shoes) to align with the world grid for precision

Once the mesh was clean and UVs were laid out, I exported everything to Substance Painter. I kept each element (hair, shirt, pants, etc.) as a separate texture set, which gave me a lot of flexibility during painting.

I used Mixamo to rig the character by exporting a combined mesh (with textures baked and applied).

I finally took the character mesh and textures and imported them into Unity and applied all the textures to new materials in preparation for animation!