The Plague Doctor - Real-Time Render

The Plague Doctor - Real-Time

The plague doctor project was a fun project that I have been working in my free time between the commissioned projects.
I made some pictures and a video to show you the project, so I hope that you enjoy and keep rolling to know about the steps that I took to make this project real-time.

Now I'll be covering the technical part of the project, how can you saw, this is a simple project that I started to keep improving my skills of the pipeline to games.

Here I'll core the quick steps that i made.
*References
*Zbrush
*Maya
*Substance painter
(Photoshop)
*Marmoset

Up here you see all the pipeline, theoretically, this is the order that you have to take, but when you put the hand on work the things change a little bit during the progress, you have to push back sometimes to make some fix or modifying something, is rarer the occasion that you can make a project straight line. But makes part of the job and never is to much back a little to make some change or add something.
Below I'll cover a little more each aspect of the pipeline.

Technical Parameters of the project for Real-Time

References

One of the most important parts of the project is the references, without them, you can't do almost anything, because you need guidance to model or maybe study the light even when you are stuck of creations the references can help, to make something real, never question the power of references.
Below you can see my references board that i created using the PureRef a free software, that helps a lot to organize your refs.

Zbrush - High poly mesh

Zbrush is the beginning of the magic, here we can start with some sketches to start to feel the character or any project that you want to do. Here I push every part of the project and until achieving a good high mesh to move to other software to make the retopology that is the second part of this project, once satisfied with the mesh or sketch you can still here until the end or can make the retopology in the begging, I made this in this project, made the retopology in the begging and bring back to ZBrush to make the refinement.
Because when you have a good clean mesh, it is a little easier to put all the details that you want.

Autodesk Maya

In Maya, I did some low-poly modelings that were easier to me make here, the retopology and UVs was made here too. How I said before, depends on how you work, I made some parts here in Maya and made the retopology early on. Once I made the retopology and satisfied with that, I started to open the UVs to start the bake that is the process where I get all the information of the High poly mesh to put in the low poly and thinking about textures and shaders.
Retopology ok and the high mesh too, I'll make the bake in substance painter.

Substance Painter

Here I can say that we are in the final straight of the project if you have all okay with you mesh and the rest is okay too. First I made the bake I use the substance painter because I have more familiarity,

for the first time here I bake the normal map to see if everything is working well if all the details that I put in Zbrush are projected well in the low poly mesh, once everything okay in this part you can find some problems that will take you back to modify or fix something.
Once you are satisfied with the normal map you can take the other one like Ambient Occlusion and roughness and all the maps that you need.

With all maps baked we can start the texture, in this project i just use um 4K map to the entire character. In ZBrush, I defined color to the little things to use a mask to paint and define the material, because in the low mesh i don't put all the information to preserve the poly count, because this we make the bake. To the other parts, I used the UVs to make a smart mask and use it to define the material and make a clean texture in each part.
(Advice always organizes your layers because is easy to get lost with then.)
Once satisfied with the texture we can bring to an engine or a software render to see a preview of the work on the textures.
First, you have to decide where you will use it, once you choose you can define the way that you will export the textures maps.

For this project, I used the Marmoset to make the real-time render, I could use Unity or even the Unreal to do that, but in this case, I used the Marmoset Toolbag, is a very easy software to use and learn.
I import the texture files of Substance to Marmoset, made some settings and set the sky and lights to have a good presentation scene and of the character too and this is the final result of this job.

Hope you like guys.