Great character design!
Do you feel better using Daz3D for character design?
What is the most benefit of creating Character using Daz3D then Character Creator?

Thank you!

To answer your question, if I'm being honest, I prefer to do my character modeling predominately in ZBrush, but as this is a Reallsuion forum, I post the character designs in the stage of development where they are being fleshed out and rendered using Reallusion products. I start off all of my sculpts at this stage in Daz Studio because the software has many more options by leaps and bounds, whether it be clothing, morphs, accessories, hair or skin shaders. That being said, Reallusion is improving significantly in many of those same areas, for example having far more morph slider options with the addition of Headshot, and soon on the skin shader front once they launch the vast improvements planned for the appearance editor for CC3 and the digital human shader (which I'm actually really excited about). Actually, I don't really use one software more than the other to create characters, rather, I use all of them in conjunction in an attempt to produce results that are unique as possible. I start the model in Daz, then import into CC3 and then customize a great deal more by using the appearance editor on CC1 Substance base skins, then applying them to the CC3 character and converting to DHS.

I also export everything from skins, to clothing and accessory textures to Photoshop or substance, then customize the living hell out of them. For example, I have been recently playing around with JoeLoXYungChuang's Divine Troop asset pack....

I took these assets...

 





Then I created new texture maps in Photoshop, including Normal, Roughness, Metallic and Ambient Occlusion, reimport to CC3 and here are the reults....

 



But keep in mind that these asset meshes are lower poly, so I only use these for look development. At the end of the day the final sculpts will be done entirely in ZBrush, with far more detail and a significant increase in poly count, which will look so much more stunning in final animation. That's why I use the RL software for look development and Previz. It's a hell of a lot easier and much faster than the process I use to create final sculpts, which sometimes take months to complete a single character. All in all though, I am quite happy with the reults I get during look development using the RL software and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be even more so once they launch those few new improvements I've been looking forward to.



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Very in-depth sharing! I understand that different people have their own different workflow, but yours is very interesting one!
The character outfits and accessories are hurdles for me now in CC3, and also hair, I find Daz3D have more option in terms of outfit, accessories, etc.
Are those assets in Daz3D free / open source? Or that's content pack / plugin purchased from the market?

I buy a ton of Daz Studio assets, which does add up over time. Significantly, lol. The upside however is that Daz offers some pretty impressive incentives that reward you for your purchases. The more you purchase, the more they offer you freebies and massive discounts. Then again, Daz has been around 20 years, so you can develop a pretty expansive ecosystem in a few decades. Reallusion is starting to really step their game up and I have been purchasing a lot more of their assets to use in my work as well, especially the those with greater detail in the craftsmanship. I personally really like the assets from Xurge3D, Scanlab, JoeLoXYungChuang, Kohlrabi Studio and Antereus, but that's entirely subjective preference. I grew up between the UK and Hong Kong, so a lot of my work is influenced by things I grew up on, which in turn influences the kind of asserts I purchase. What I would suggest to you is just keep experimenting with whatever you have access to and see what results you can produce until you find your voice as an artist. Inspiration, experimentation and realization go together like a perfectly cooked steak, baked potatoes and a cold pint of Guinness.



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Thanks mate!

I grew up on everything from Gu Long Wuxia novels and Ma Wing Shing manga, to Chang Cheh, Akira Kurosawa, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, John Woo, Takashi Miike films and Hayao Miyazaki anime, so that all has a HUGE influence on my work. At least in regard to the Asian inspired stuff...

Believe it or not, these aren't even the Zbrush sculpted versions. I just used the tools available to me between Daz, CC3, Substance and Photoshop. Both Daz and Reallusion softwares have some pretty solid morph sets for good musculature and skin wrinkles, provided that you really do a bit of customization on the normal and roughness maps if you plan to be able to see those effects once you transfer the characters over to Unreal Engine. Daz has a sweet vascularity morph set by Zev0 that I imported and saved to CC3 and then created a corresponding morph slider. I really wish they would hurry up with the update for CC3 though, because I already have a sneaking suspicion that when they finally do, a lot of the work I'm doing now will be rendered obsolete and I'm going to start playing around in there and then want to go back and want to redo all of my characters to see if I can improve the look even further. Curse my OCD, lol.



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A few more CC3 Iray renders of the character designs for this project...










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Wow amazing characters. 

Where did you get these great costumes from?

Liebe Grüße Vlado

Thank you!

As far as my costume designs go, I have been recording and documenting my workflow process with the intent of eventually releasing an in depth series of behind the scenes videos of my entire process from conceptualization to animation, but the short answer is that each character's costume is kitbashed and customized from literally a dozen or more sources for each character. I might like a shoe from an asset pack I see one place, or a belt I see in another and so on, so I'll take assets I buy from everywhere like Daz, Renderosity, Reallusion, ShareCG, Sketchfab and Gumroad, then experiment with combinations until I get the results closer to what I want. After I get the results I'm looking for, I go back and play around with the texture maps until I get better, more customized and detailed results. I have a pretty extensive library of PBR textures I've amassed over time, so I might spend hours alone searching through different fabrics until I find one that I happen to like the weave pattern of, or perhaps a wood patter for a specific prop and so on, then I'll add the aforementioned texture, or maybe even just the diffuse or normal map to whatever asset I'm customizing, perhaps adjust the tiling a bit, depending on the fabric, metal, or wood in question and Bob's your uncle. The irony is that I end up going back and redesigning the entire character from scratch in Zbrush, Marvelous Designer and Substance anyway, but I like to have the concept fleshed out before I begin that process, so this is the way I'm used to working.



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Here are some more characters from this series. This portion of characters are inspired by the classic rivalry between Shaolin and the Wudang school depicted in Shaw Bros. films.
































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Your models look so cool! I've been trying to make Kung-Styled clothing for the past month, but I can never get that style of clothing to conform correctly, especially when it comes to shirts that go a little bit below the crotch area such a Karate or Kung Fu gi, mind sharing some of your methods?