For the Trico model, I really wanted to try a more classical sculptural style and train my hand with the sculptris tool.

Texturing

I do my base color with polypaint in ZBrush almost always because putting color in the sculpt helps my eye to see the proportions better. If it’s a speed sculpt, I just use this polypaint as vertex color that I export in Marmoset, I don’t do UVs.

If I go for real UV texture (I do my UVS in 3DS Max or 3D Coat, generally), I bake the polypaint in ID color in Substance and then use it as my base color. I like to bake a second ID color map, where I use colors based on the type of materials (ex: one type of metal orange, one type of leather blue, green for hair, pink for skin etc…), then I can use those ID to create my folders group to have a clean Substance file. I use Substance for pretty much all my baking process because I just love the result and how easy it is to do it (the bake by mesh name feature is perfect).

I like to hand-paint a lot of stuff because it’s a process that I enjoy. Gradient colors and color variations are super important to me, I use a lot of the light and gradient generator in substance to help push the volumes.