ÓSCAR FERNÁNDEZ / DIGITAL SCULPTOR
Óscar Fernández is a freelance digital sculptor from Spain, specializing in creating figures for 3D printing. With deep expertise in ZBrush, he is known for crafting highly expressive characters that capture both personality and motion. His work stands out through the meticulous attention to facial expression, muscle definition, and dynamic posing, giving each sculpt a strong sense of tension and storytelling power.
Overview
With the arrival of Character Creator version 5, artists can enjoy revolutionary improvements, including an HD character design workflow with subdivision support, enhanced shaders, and the next generation of the facial animation system.
In this article, we’re going to explore the workflow to create this character, putting CC5’s new features to the test by designing this humanoid alien. Instead of sticking to the classic human proportions, we’ll see how the program behaves when we make things a little more challenging.
I’m Óscar Fernández, and I’ll be guiding you throughout this process using only two programs: CC5, which will handle almost all of the technical processes automatically. ZBrush, where we’ll unleash our creativity and focus on the artistic side of the project.
For the creation of this character, we’ll start from a sketch by KithArt, a young concept artist I’ve collaborated with several times before. She’ll be responsible for designing this character and the ones to come.
So, without further ado, let’s dive in!
1. Loading a neutral base in CC5
Once we’ve opened CC5, we simply press “Load Neutral Base” to load Character Creator’s new mesh. This mesh has perfect topology for sculpting and animation, optimized UVs, and the robust skeletal rigging we’re already used to from previous versions. It also includes a significant update to the eye mesh.
For now, I want to focus only on volumes, so I’ll go to the materials tab, select different body areas, set the strength to 0, and darken the Diffuse to gray. This way, we can better appreciate basic changes.
2. Setting basic proportions in CC5
Now we’ll start setting the basic proportions of our character using the program’s sliders. For the body, I’ll mainly adjust the pelvis height—since our character will have short legs—and the size of the hands and feet.
Personally, I like checking communication between programs from the beginning, so after making some first adjustments, I’ll send the character to ZBrush. We press the GoZ Plus button, and for now, we’ll make sure not to send any maps, colors, or normals, and we’ll keep the default subdivisions. With the rest of the values as is, we press GoZ, and our character loads directly into ZBrush.
Here it is, everything is working as expected, so let’s head back to CC5 to continue adjusting the head and face proportions. The sliders allow me to separate the eyes and change their tilt very easily—something that would take more effort sculpting directly in ZBrush. After a few more tweaks, we go back to GoZ Plus to send the model again. This time, the “Relink” action appears automatically since the connection is already established. Boom! We’ve got the changes loaded into our model.
3. Starting the sculpting process in ZBrush
Now we’re ready for the fun part, but before diving in, we need to keep a few key rules in mind:
- Don’t modify the model’s topology.
- Don’t delete subdivision levels.
- Don’t alter the default pose.
- Don’t rename the Subtools.
With that clear, we can begin sculpting in ZBrush. In these early stages, where we’re looking for the general shape of the head or face, we should try to adapt to the model’s facial topology. This ensures facial deformations work perfectly later when we apply expressions. To better visualize these regions, we can isolate the head and load the texture provided by CC5.
My advice: take it slow, build the model step by step, and don’t rush to higher subdivision levels. Start broad, then move to detail.
4. Test with GoZ Plus
As I mentioned earlier, I prefer moving gradually and making sure everything works as expected. So from time to time, I send the character back to CC5 using the new GoZ Plus plugin.
In the plugin options, we only select Lv0, with no maps or textures. Once updated in CC5, we can test everything by loading animations, whether full-body or face-only.
5. Real-time adjustments
Sometimes CC5 sliders are more practical than sculpting directly in ZBrush. We can make corrections anytime, then send them back to ZBrush to continue sculpting and adding details. While shaping the character, we can repeat this back-and-forth workflow as many times as necessary.
6. Secondary and tertiary forms
Now we’ve got a solid base shape that works great in CC5, so it’s time to add secondary and tertiary forms. So far, we’ve mainly ensured the facial structure aligns with the base mesh topology. Now we’ll start adding character through anatomical volumes that give our model a unique and expressive look. I’ll also use Pablo Muñoz’s incredible brush pack inspired by Giger and Beksiński to add extra details.
We’ll do the same with the body by defining muscles, large skin folds, and natural body curves. These early changes are key for making the character work at medium distance…
7. Bone and pose fixes
If our character doesn’t follow the typical human form, the skeleton might be slightly misaligned, or animations may behave oddly due to extreme proportions. Again, the solution is super simple. To adjust the skeleton to the body, we just press “Adjust Bones”, enable symmetry, and run an automatic adjustment for both the body and face.
If we want to tweak the default pose or fix animation issues, we can use the “Pose Offset” tool to select body parts and adjust them. For example, here we solve fist collisions just by slightly modifying the offset.
8. Adding color with polypaint
Once again, I turned to KithArt for help with design and color palettes. Out of all the proposals, we’ve chosen this one.
The final step in ZBrush is texturing our character with Polypaint. We’ll use the SkinShade material to avoid color contamination and apply gradients, masks, and manual painting techniques to color the character. This stage is really fun and gives our character its true identity. With all sculpting details and color information in place, we can wrap up the character’s creation. At this stage, we can push to subdivision level 7, achieving an extremely high poly count without sculpting or texturing limitations.
9. Adaptable subdivisions & auto texture baking
Now we reach one of CC5’s most powerful new features: subdivision compatibility and automatic texture baking. As we’ve seen, the new GoZ Plus works a bit differently than before. Let’s see how to handle it.
So far, we’ve always sent the model from ZBrush to CC5 at Lv0 without textures. Now it’s time to generate normal and displacement maps for details, plus the diffuse map from our Polypaint. We’ll select Lv0 and press the corresponding buttons for each map. By pressing “All”, all textures are generated automatically using the base mesh’s UDIMs. Once baked, we simply update the model in CC5, and they load automatically. In my case, I’ll skip updating the eye diffuse to keep the original texture.
Now the textures are loaded, but we can’t see them yet because earlier in the project we had set intensity to 0. So we select the different body parts, raise the strength to 100%, and reset Diffuse to white. With one click, everything integrates in CC.
This was already possible in CC4, but here comes the innovation: We subdivide once in CC5 and go back to ZBrush. From GoZ Plus, we activate Lv1 and all its textures, press “All” again, and regenerate them automatically. Back in CC5, we update only the textures, and immediately we see a big difference between the two models. But that’s not all—we can repeat the process again by subdivision to Lv2 in CC5, enabling Lv2 with textures in GoZ, updating in CC5 one last time, and voilà… the difference is striking!
On top of that, CC5 lets us work in ultra-high resolution. We can see the polygon density at each subdivision level—from Lv0 (unsmoothed mesh) to Lv1 (already dense), up to Lv2 (where no detail escapes our control). GoZ Plus generates optimized maps for each subdivision, and we can tweak intensity across levels depending on our needs. For instance, at Lv2 with displacement at 100%, the vertex shifts add spectacular improvements to the silhouette, with more natural shadows and enhanced fine detail beyond what normal maps provide. Here’s a clear comparison showing the power of subdivision levels and auto displacement baking in CC5.
Conclusion
This update allows us to take our ZBrush models to the highest level of detail, and with just one click, transfer everything into CC5 as a fully animatable character. From there, we can still apply morphs, textures, clothing, hair, and accessories, while keeping all of CC’s facial and body animation capabilities: motion libraries, motion capture, voice-based lip-sync, and pose/animation editing. And this is just one of CC5’s new improvements—don’t miss the other exciting features still to be discovered!
FAQ
Can I animate ZBrush characters directly in Character Creator 5?
Yes. With CC5’s GoZ Plus bridge, you can transfer your ZBrush sculpts, bake textures automatically, and animate them with body motions, facial expressions, and lip sync.
Do I need to retopologize my ZBrush sculpt before sending it to CC5?
No. CC5’s neutral base mesh has clean topology and is animation-ready. You only need to sculpt details and then bake displacement and normal maps for transfer.
How does CC5 handle HD subdivision from ZBrush?
CC5 supports adaptive subdivisions. You can send models back and forth at different levels (Lv0, Lv1, Lv2) and automatically generate optimized maps for each.
Can CC5 handle non-human characters sculpted in ZBrush?
Yes. CC5 includes tools like Adjust Bones and Pose Offset to fix skeleton alignment, making even stylized or alien proportions fully animatable.
What animation features can I use once the sculpt is in CC5?
You can apply motion capture, motion libraries, facial morphs, dynamic wrinkles, and voice-based lip sync to bring your ZBrush characters to life.
Related Posts
- The Expert Guide to Stylized ZBrush Expressions for Salvador Dali
- 3D Printing and Character Posing with ZBrush & Character Creator
