Character Clothing/Armor Exercise

This project was driven by a personal goal: to build custom character clothing entirely from scratch. I started by creating the leather base model in Maya, then brought the armor and base character into ZBrush. This was my first time hand-sculpting cloth directly in ZBrush, which proved to be an incredible learning experience in understanding polygroups and making fabric conform naturally to the body.

After the high-poly sculpt was finished, I finalized the low-poly mesh and carefully packed the UVs, optimizing the entire asset to use a single combined texture map. Moving into texturing, I baked the high-poly data down onto the low-poly model. I took a deeper dive into Substance 3D Painter to expand my knowledge of its advanced feature set. Finally, I challenged myself to handle all final rendering directly within Unreal Engine. By building out custom, reusable lighting scenarios and rendering with the 4K texture map, I was able to maintain high-fidelity details while streamlining my pipeline and bypassing traditional offline rendering software.

A huge thank you to Mike Trezza for the invaluable guidance and feedback throughout this process!

Credits:
Base body mesh by cgspektor: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/male-body-2-bf7eb5f7f2504f7bbdda4ab00a71e23c
Armor References: https://www.ebay.com/itm/175349101064