UFC Fighter | Real-time UE5

Hi there! I’m happy to present my latest personal project that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. I designed from the initial concept in Zbrush to the final presentation in Unreal Engine 5.
I wanted to represent a female warrior from the World of Warcraft universe but bring it to the modern era, thinking about how this character will be developed in our current society.
The character was designed primarily in Zbrush, where I started sculpting from a base mesh provided by 3dscanstore, which gave me an initial shape and tertiary details but rapidly evolved to something more fantasy in proportions. Having this base I started the look development in Marmoset, which is very easy when setting up a scene. Having the base done, I started to rig the model in Maya using the Advanced Skeleton plugin, having the option of building the same in a nondestructive way, and additionally having the option of adding custom control where I needed.
As for animation and pose, I did an initial test in Maya to see all the corrective blend shapes that you can see in the video here. This serves as a way of supporting your rigging for poses that are hard to deform, for instance, the shoulders, wrists, elbows, knees, etc. I’m not a rigger by profession, so definitely there is much more room for improvement, even for solving deformation issues in a more optimized way. I did an additional pass on the final pose in Zbrush, fixing some weird deformation and adding extra secondary details.
The hair was done in Houdini, which I like more than Maya since the tools are more user-friendly and procedurals. Additionally, I can easily transfer a hair system from model to model with just a few clicks (which I did here from a previous character). Export it as alembic to later use in UE5 as a hair strand using the latest hair shader.
Finally, for the presentation I used UE5, where I took use of the cinematic options for lighting and development of the character, also gave me the possibility of playing around with more complex shaders for the skin and the clothes materials.
As a final note, this was an experiment using all the latest industry techniques but also keeping in mind the engine limitations, which nowadays seem to be less and less compared to offline rendering. I’m looking forward to making more stuff in the UE5 and also seeing what Unreal comes up with in future updates.
Hope you like it, cheers.