Advanced Character Creation with Ben Erdt

Join senior Blizzard character artist Ben Erdt and learn to build advanced characters for game cinematics! You'll learn to analyse a concept sketch, sculpt your character in ZBrush, create materials in Painter, light and present your work, and much more.

After completing the course, you'll have a deep understanding of how to create your own world-class character art.

Cinematic Character Workflow
Starting off in ZBrush, Ben will teach you advanced techniques for building your 3D character from scratch. When concept sculpting the model, we'll block in both the anatomy and hard surface mesh. Once the high-poly is done, we build the actual render mesh using clean and industry standard topology, built for animation and performance. The entire render mesh is UV mapped using UDIMS.

In Painter, we're creating the materials step by step. We'll set up basic shaders, build a color hierarchy and focus on storytelling by adding aging, wear and tear, and dirt to the textures. Finally, we're lighting and rendering our character to make a stunning final image you'll be proud to put in your portfolio.

Hard Surface Modeling
We're covering how to build the character suit and armour from scratch, and have packed the course with an abundance of advanced hard surface techniques. The entire suit is sculpted in Zbrush up to a rough state, and then cleaned up using three different tec