Lately I’ve been making a game character. I must say, that was a lot more work than I had anticipated. In the end it took me about seven days from start to finish, including a simple rig and a simple environment.

Most of the high-res work was done in Zbrush with Modo for the modelling of the low-res parts and the final retopology. The budget they gave me was 5000 tris, not very high for todays standards, and I used 4972 of them. Modo was also used for painting of the textures, which is a little bit better than Zbrush I think because you can straight away set the resolution of the textures. In Zbrush you basically paint a vertex color map, so to get a decent resolution for your texture you need a fairly dense mesh. In Modo you really paint on the texture (which size you decide), even if you have a very low resolution mesh, which keeps the scene more responsive. An other advantage is that working with layers is easier, a drawback is that only 8 textures can be visible at the same time.

Post work on the textures as well as painting specular and glow maps were done in Photoshop. UV’s were made with UVLayout (best program I ever bought!!). Normal and Occlusion map were done with XNormal.

Here are some pictures of the character. The top picture is the high-res sculpt in Zbrush, the middle picture is the low-res model in the Unity game engine and the lower picture is a beauty render from Modo.
The supplied concept was by Red Stream.