Instructor Info

Nikolay Naydenov is a Senior Character Artist currently working in Gameloft. Nikolay always had deep interest in art. In his spare time he was either reading a book or scribbling on a notebook ever since he was a child. He has been in the game industry since 2007 and had worked in many projects. The project that he is most proud of is the game titled March of Empires. He loves his job as a character artist especially when he is given freedom to do his own concepting and ideas. His advice for everyone just starting out is to spend lots of time learning software programs, be efficient and fast, and also spend many hours learning the anatomy, studying faces, and muscles underneath the skin. As every profession, to be good at something, you have to practice a lot. He recommends students to always look for improvement and never settle. He believes good things require sacrifice of time and other pleasures and this can turn your passion into a profession.

Course Info

In this course, we will make a high resolution character that we sculpted in Zbrush ready for production. First, we will start by exporting the high poly parts using the decimation master tool in Zbrush. Then we will import them in 3ds Max and start making the low poly by retopologizing the decimated meshes. We will learn how to retopologize, make the most out of our forms and follow the silhouette with fewer polygons. Then we will make the UV coordinates for our low poly in 3ds Max with little help from Zbrush. After that, we will bake the textures from high to the low poly using Substance Painter. Then we will continue in Substance Painter to make the texture. You will learn how to create realistic painted metal, scales, dirt and more. We will make our textures super detailed using various layering techniques and strategic hand painting. We will even go through the process of creating emissive materials to further enhance our model. We will present our model using Substance Painter's Iray Render and then later on put it inside Marmoset to create a turntable video that will allow us to display our model in the best possible light. At the end, our amazing model will be ready for animation and game engine.