Character Sculpt Dragonslayer

This was my 2025 capstone project at Chatham University.

In this project my goal was to learn the workflows for creating a character covered in armor and implementing them into a game engine, in this case Unreal Engine 5.

I was able to be exposed to and learn about hard surface sculpting within ZBrush, rigging in Maya, rendering within Marmoset Toolbag 5, as well as Unreal Engine tools for animation retargetting.

Hard-Surface Sculpting:
Below are a couple quick renders within ZBrush of the detailed models for part of the armor set.

Rigging:
This was my first time creating a rig for a character to not just pose them but to instead have the goal of being playable within a game engine. I also played around with adding bones to the cape around the waist but ended up learning how to do cloth sims within UE5.

Marmoset Rendering:
Next, I experimented with poses in marmoset and rendered out a couple of poses that I found interesting. I also did a couple individual shots of the armor.

Unreal Engine:
Here’s a gif showcasing ik retargetting in UE5. I did not create the animations, I was simply using this as a demonstration to show how this model I made and rigged could be used by someone else to create animations. I then put this model in an environment in UE5 to showcase how I envisioned this model would look in a game.