With clean bakes ready, I moved on to texturing in Substance Painter. Importing the character initially gave me errors, but after adjusting a few export settings in Maya, everything loaded properly. I started with the skin because it was the most important part to get right. I followed tutorials from Abe Leal to achieve semi-realistic skin with subsurface scattering and proper roughness variation. This was my first time aiming for a more realistic skin texture, and I was happy with the results.
After finishing the skin, I textured the clothes and hair, which were easier but still time-consuming. Finally, I textured the eyes and created a special glow layer for the iris, which I planned to use in certain scenes.
Texturing
When the texturing was done, I went back into Maya and started rigging using Advanced Skeleton. This was one of the scariest stages for me because I didn’t have much rigging experience. The initial skeleton generation was simple, but the weight painting took days. Advanced Skeleton didn’t generate clean weights for me, so I manually fixed almost everything.
Maya also crashed multiple times during rigging. I faced issues like:
- Controllers not working
- Improperly mirrored joints
- Incorrect skinning
- Unexpected errors during build
I eventually got the body rig to deform nicely, but then a major issue appeared: the clothes wouldn’t deform properly. They moved awkwardly, stretched incorrectly, and didn’t follow the body realistically. I tried re-rigging, using deformers, adjusting weights—nothing solved it. I started worrying I wouldn’t be able to use my character at all.
Rigging
Then I had an idea: instead of rigging the clothes, what if I simulated them?
So I installed Marvelous Designer. I had very little experience with MD, but I recreated the exact garments from my ZBrush sculpt by using the original sculpt as reference. At first, I faced several issues because I was still learning the software, but after watching tutorials and getting some help from Reddit, I was able to rebuild all the clothes and simulate them realistically.
Since the UVs changed, I retextured the clothes again.
Marvelous Designer Clothes
I also planned out my workflow going forward:
- Animate the character without clothes
- Finalise the animation
- Then simulate the clothing shot by shot depending on the scene
- Apply different simulations for Maya scenes vs Unreal Engine scenes
For the facial rig, Advanced Skeleton created a basic setup, but it had limitations. The eyebrow controls were very simple—just two controls for each brow—so I couldn’t create subtle expressions like squeezing the eyebrows during dialogue. But the rig was good enough to get me through the project, and after some weight painting fixes, I was satisfied with it.
This blog covers one of the toughest stages of my pipeline, but also the most rewarding because I managed to solve a problem that almost stopped my project entirely.