How To Create Your Own Hand-Painted 3D Characters

6/1/2020 How to Create Your Own Hand-Painted 3D Characters
“Draw Your Weapons”
The Motivation
The journey started when I participated in a competition hosted by
Yekaterina Bourykina. The challenge was to create a hand-painted
character bust. I ended up winning the competition and gaining tons of
experience with hand-painting!
https://discover.therookies.co/2019/07/21/how-to-create-your-own-hand-painted-3d-characters/ 3/20
The 3D character bust that started my hand-painting journey.
My Thoughts and Goals

After the 3D bust was received so well, I wanted to set the bar higher and
create a full character. I’m a big fan of Jake Wyatt and his Necropolis
comic, so I decided to create the protagonist from the comic.
The biggest thing I wanted to nail in this project was the emotion. The
girl is a ferocious character filled with rage, which she eventually
demonstrates by slaughtering a bunch of bad guys. Those kinds of
emotions aren’t easy to translate into a 3D model, but I took it as a
challenge.
LEARNING
How to Create Your Own Hand-

Painted 3D Characters
by Manuel Sitompul 10 months ago 7 MIN READ
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Loading 3D model
Draw Your Weapons by Manuel Sitompul on Sketchfab
Games have always been a big interest for me. As a child I spent the
majority of my time exploring the story and worlds of Zelda, Pokémon
and Rayman. I got so immersed in these worlds that I decided to start
making my own by playing with Game Maker and learning GML.
However, my first real game art experience started when I decided to

study Visual Art at Breda University of Applied Sciences. At school I
learned about the many sides of game art, such as: procedural
modeling, 3D animation, standard asset creation and engine
implementation. Experiencing this provided me with a good base to
start making my own projects.
The reference board for Jake Wyatt’s character from Necropolis.
Sculpting the Character

I started the character by creating a block-out in ZBrush. Creating quick
blobs in the shape of a human allowed me to establish the anatomy and
style pretty quickly.
Basic block-out I made in ZBrush.
I continued by Dynameshing the block-out and refining the basic shapes

of the body. Adding muscular detail wasn’t a priority because it was not
yet determined where the clothing pieces would cover up the body.
Additionally, I didn't need to sculpt very detailed, because the sculpt
would only be used for a diffuse bake which I could paint over.
Dynameshing and smoothing the block-out to create a simple mannequin.
While sculpting the face, it was very helpful to have some extra features
in place, such as eyebrows, eyelashes and hair. For the hair I used a
haircurves brush, edited by Chris Whitaker, called
makkon_haircurves_03. For the eyelashes and other pieces of special
geometry, I modeled it in Maya and put it in ZBrush. I advise anyone
who is new to sculpting, if there’s any task that seems easier in your
preferred modeling software, it’s probably worth it.
Using makkon_haircurves_03 to create the hair strands, and modeling the eyelashes in Maya.
The girl from the comic has very dynamic and wrinkled clothing, so it
took me some experimentation to figure out how to approach this
problem. I started by creating a simple dress in Marvelous Designer,
which allows me to create realistic creases in the clothing.
Experimenting in Marvelous Designer to create clothing.
In the end I decided to sculpt all the clothing except the skirt. In this
case I liked the amount of control I had by sculpting the folds by hand.
Even though it isn’t as realistic as a Marvelous Designer simulation, I
could get away with it because of the hand-painted nature of the
project.
Using ZBrush to create the clothes was simple, I took the base body,
masked it, and used Subtool > Extract with a subtle Thickness. I
continued by using the Standardbrush to paint some folds.
The process of creating the clothes.
The various stages I went through while creating the sculpt.
Retopologizing the Character

When the sculpt was finished, it was time to create a low-poly version
which I could bake the sculpt on. I merged all my subtools with Merge >
Merge Visible. Unfortunately, Maya doesn’t like a 12 million poly mesh,

so I had to decimate the mesh using Decimation Master to lower the
poly-count a bit.
When the decimated model was in Maya, I made the object live, and
used Quad Draw to draw the faces on the mesh. I used this technique to
retopologize the entire character. I ended up connecting a lot of the
clothing to the skin, which would help me skin the character more
easily, and result in less artifacts in animation.
The final topology of the character.
Texturing the Character

I started this project to build some experience doing hand-painted
textures. Like my last hand-painted project, I used 3D Coat because of
its dynamic link with Photoshop. 3D-Coat also allows me to make
projections of the 3D model, which I can paint over in Photoshop.
For this project, I decided on diffuse-only textures, which means the

final product will not interact with lighting in any way. This means all
the shadows, reflections and highlights must be painted by hand.
To start off, I wanted to create some base colors and basic lighting. I
imported my model into Substance Painter and baked the high-poly
model on the low-poly. I continued by using an incredible smart-
material called SoMuchDiffuse. This smart-material takes the high-poly
sculpted data and bakes it down into a single diffuse texture. Using this
tool, I added base colors and gradients for every part of the character.
The base character texture generated with the use of SoMuchDiffuse
This is where the hand-painting starts. I continued by exporting the new

diffuse texture and importing it into 3D-Coat. My painting process is very
straight-forward. My main focus is always to add more definition and
highlight to the areas that I want the viewer to focus on. I started by
painting lighter values fading from the middle of the face, which gives
the face more depth. Additionally, I tried painting a lot of different hues
in the face such as reds, greens and blues. I treat this process no
different than painting a character in a 2D illustration.
Using the base made in Substance Painter to hand-paint over in 3D-Coat
The eyes in particular were fun to make! The vertex in the center of the
eyeball is going inwards to create a parallax effect. Additionally, there’s a
separate mesh for the cornea, on which I painted the eyes’ reflection.
Because there’s distance between the reflection and the pupil now, the
eyes have much more depth.
Additionally, there’s a separate mesh for the

cornea, on which I painted the eyes’ reflection.
The cornea is a separate mesh from the eyeball itself, adding depth to the eye.
I couldn’t call the textures finished until the character was rigged and
posed. For example, changing the position of the arms can create new
shadows and creases which I need to hand-paint. I proceeded to create
a basic skeleton for the character and a few bones for the facial
expression.
The skeleton of the character
Settling on a pose and the facial expression took a while. Eventually I

settled on a specific panel from the comic (Chapter 01, page 10), where
the girl held a simple but strong pose. When the posing was finished, I
could paint the shadows and ambient occlusion, because I now knew
which side of the limbs would face outwards.
The textures before the posing was done, and the textures after I painted according to the pose.
The Environment
I think an important part of selling your character is presentation. You
can spend hundreds of hours on a project, but if you don’t present it
right, people will miss out on what you made. For this project I cared a
lot about emotion and immersion in character, so I tried to take that into
account when presenting. Adding a simple pedestal wouldn’t be very
immersive, so I decided to create a small animated forest environment
around the girl.
The process of building the nature environment.
Retrospective
I have never done a hand-painting project this big, and it’s safe to say it
was quite a challenge. Getting all the materials to feel coherent while
keeping the hand-painted details consistent took a long time.
However, the biggest challenge was the face. The character is supposed
to be an angry and fierce young woman. Yet, I needed to sculpt her in a
neutral pose so the character could be used in possible future scenes
where she is conveying different emotions. In retrospect, I would’ve
sculpted the character with her expression immediately, so I could get
the feeling of the scene from the beginning. I could always resculpt the
face if I need new expressions.
R E A D M O R E P O STS BY T H I S A U T H O R
Manuel Sitompul
NEWER POST
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OLDER POST
An Artist’s Guide - Learning Python Scripting for

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Afterword
If you got this far, thank you for reading! I hope this inspires you to make
something new! You can find me on Artstation and Twitter. Feel free to
send me a message if you have any questions!
S H A R E YO U R T H O U G H TS O N T H I S P O ST
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6/1/2020 How to Create Your Own Hand-Painted 3D Characters

“Draw Your Weapons”

The 3D character bust that started my hand-painting journey.

My Thoughts and Goals

How to Create Your Own Hand-

Draw Your Weapons by Manuel Sitompul on Sketchfab

However, my first real game art experience started when I decided to

The reference board for Jake Wyatt’s character from Necropolis.

Sculpting the Character

Basic block-out I made in ZBrush.

I continued by Dynameshing the block-out and refining the basic shapes

Dynameshing and smoothing the block-out to create a simple mannequin.

Experimenting in Marvelous Designer to create clothing.

The process of creating the clothes.

The various stages I went through while creating the sculpt.

Retopologizing the Character

Merge Visible. Unfortunately, Maya doesn’t like a 12 million poly mesh,

The final topology of the character.

Texturing the Character

For this project, I decided on diﬀuse-only textures, which means the

the shadows, reflections and highlights must be painted by hand.

The base character texture generated with the use of SoMuchDiﬀuse

This is where the hand-painting starts. I continued by exporting the new

Using the base made in Substance Painter to hand-paint over in 3D-Coat

Additionally, there’s a separate mesh for the

Settling on a pose and the facial expression took a while. Eventually I

The process of building the nature environment.

An Artist’s Guide - Learning Python Scripting for

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