Shaolin Warrior

I would like to share my experience creating this model of a Shaolin warrior. I collected several references that I mixed several aspects of the body, the face and the outfit.

I used ZBrush to sculpt the body and Marvelous Designer for the outfit. I then used ZBrush to create the details for the outfit and the rest of his clothes

I used Maya to retopologize the model and prepare for rigging. I also used Marmoset for texture bakes and Substance painter for texturing

I was planning to convert him to a metahuman skeleton. It was a very time-consuming process (I know there will be a new workflow for UE 5.8 which I will explore). You have to conform the topology of a metahuman body and face meshes to your character. I used Houdini topology transfer node to do this and due to a bug in the import, the skeleton was corrupted.

I tried using 2DNAX plugin for Maya to correct the skeleton and eventually succeeded in transferring my character to a metahuman rig.

There were some issues I faced with the metahuman rig that made me rig the character again using Blender rigify addon, most importantly:
- Cloth simulation was a little buggy and performance impacting, especially for a fast animation like the one I was planning. I tried several approaches to make the cloth collide with SKM of his pants and upper body, but it still had some issues

- The ears were not transferred properly in Houdini using the topology transfer, so I had to mix with the metahuman realistic ears, which looked too realistic for the character’s stylized design I was planning

- The same issue for his eye brows, I was unable to find a way to convert my stylized eye-brows to the metahuman rig. I tried weight paint transfer and blend shape transfer, but still didn’t work
Eventually, I rigged the character to rigify rig in Blender and started animation.

I faced another issue in cloth simulation. The default cloth simulation settings in Blender did not give me a good quality for cloth simulation, even when trying very high quality steps for cloth and collisions.
I decided to give Marvelous designer cloth simulation a try and it worked fine in MD, however, when I transferred the simulation back to Blender using the Mesh Cache modifier, there was a mismatch in the animation and simulation speeds.

I suspected this to be due to the FPS settings of the simulation and the animation, but couldn’t get them right. I returned to Blender’s cloth simulation and fiddled around with the collision distances, friction, damping and impulse clamping until I got a decent result.

I learnt a lot in this experience and I plan to give UE 5.8 a try to transfer the character and test more animations