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.

Check Oscar’s ArtStation

Overview

An exciting update in Character Creator 5 (CC5) is the addition of more free add-ons designed to streamline your workflow across leading industry tools. With the new UDIM integration in Marmoset Toolbag 5, it’s now possible to achieve a direct, hassle-free transition between CC5 and your rendering software using Auto Setup for Marmoset. We’ll start off with an existing project for a set of alien characters and finish with a high-quality final render.

Installation

The installation is super easy: Download the Auto Setup plugin for Marmoset from the Reallusion website and extract the files. Open Marmoset and go to Edit > Plugin, then click Show User Plugin Folder. When the folder opens, simply drag in the Auto Setup files you just extracted. Go back to the Plugin menu and click Refresh to reload the plugin data. Once it’s installed correctly, CC Auto Setup for Marmoset will appear under the Plugin menu. Now you can click on it to open the Auto Setup panel — but before that, head over to CC5.

Character Export from CC5

In our case, we don’t have any clothing or accessories, but we are going to apply a pose to our character before exporting. Adjust the body posture, and you can also add facial expressions if you want. Save the pose in case you want to use it later. Select the character, go to the File menu, choose Export, and select FBX. Pick the Clothed Character option — even though in this case our character isn’t wearing any clothes. Once the export window opens, you’ll see a bunch of presets depending on the target software, but in our case, we’ll choose Marmoset Toolbag to automatically set up compatibility with Marmoset. 

Under FBX Options, make sure Mesh and Motion is enabled to include the character’s animation data. For Motion Settings, select Current Pose, leave the rest of the settings at their default values, and hit Export. Once the export is complete, you’ll find the FBX file along with its associated textures and a JSON file. This JSON file is very important because it links the textures to the model, defining which part of the mesh uses which texture.

Character import to Marmoset Toolbag

Now, in Marmoset, go to the Plugins menu as we did before and open Character Creator and iClone Auto Setup. The plugin couldn’t be easier to use: 

Select the FBX file you just exported from CC5, and the JSON file will automatically link to it. Click Import and wait for the character to load. The loading process is usually quite fast, but it may take a bit longer if you selected Subdivision Level 2, since that makes the file larger. Once it’s loaded, you can examine the character from every angle before moving on. 

Adjusting lighting and environment (Lookdev settings)

The plugin doesn’t just load the file and textures — it also provides a set of presets to light your scene. Any imported object or character will automatically be illuminated using the Full Body Light presets. When switching between presets, you’ll notice that a different HDRI image is also loaded in the Sky section, which helps create a more vibrant and coherent render. Similarly, if you want to focus on the face, you can choose one of the configurations included under Headlighting. This gives you a high-quality starting setup that you can easily tweak and play around with. 

Directly from the plugin, you can adjust the HDRI brightness and rotation to preview how the lighting affects your model from different angles. Ray tracing is enabled by default for high-quality rendering with optimized preset settings, but of course, you can modify them if needed.

Once our character is imported, we can continue tweaking all the typical Marmoset settings to customize the scene to our liking — adjusting the camera settings, such as focal length, depth of field, adding post-processing effects, and more. As mentioned earlier, we can play around with the HDRI values. The lighting setup we get from the presets is also fully customizable — you can adjust the color, brightness, light softness, and of course, its position. With all these options, you can create a completely personalized scene and fine-tune it precisely to match your character and the mood or story you want to convey.

Materials preparation

The first material we can experiment with is the background, adjusting parameters like color, roughness, or metalness to change the atmosphere of our scene. Thanks to the Auto Setup plugin, the Digital Human shader is applied automatically — meaning all the necessary parameters for each texture are transferred to Marmoset so that everything looks exactly as it did in CC5. 

We won’t go into every material in detail, but for each one we can modify all the settings to fully customize it. For example, making the skin look wetter or more metallic, changing the eye color and all related parameters, adjusting the tiling of the normal map to control how skin details behave, tweaking skin transparency values, and more. We can fine-tune the details endlessly. 

Animations

Another advantage of working with Marmoset is that we can also render animations, and the process is just as simple as what we saw for a static pose. In our case, we’ll choose a simple animation, such as a walking cycle, and enable position locking so the character walks in place. Then we go to the export settings as we did before. We select Subdivision Level 0 so the import into Marmoset is faster and the animation runs more smoothly. We also make sure to check Current Animation and All, so the full animation is exported. Additionally, we ensure the frame rate matches the project settings in Marmoset (in our case, 30 fps), and then we just export the FBX.

Now, we launch Marmoset and load our character through the plugin as we saw in the previous example, and then all we have to do is hit Play to run the animation. With Ray Tracing enabled, the animation may not look smooth in the viewport, but it will render perfectly. Next, we can slightly adjust the scene by changing the background color and some lighting parameters. I’m going to place the character walking on a simple base I created in ZBrush. I’ll adjust the size and position of the base, as well as the backdrop, so they align with the bottom of the character. Now the scene is ready. I’ll apply a metallic material to the base and tweak the material settings slightly so it doesn’t overshadow the character. 

To keep the renders of our characters consistent with each other, I’m going to save this empty scene. So I delete the character but keep the lighting setup and the base. Then I delete all materials except for the backdrop and base materials, place them in a folder, and save the project. Now I can load another character using the Auto Setup plugin, but this time I’ll uncheck Apply Look Dev so the scene configuration is preserved. We can also uncheck this option if we want to apply our own lighting setup.

This animation was exported with Subdivision Level 2, and my PC struggles a bit to handle it, so I go to the body mesh and uncheck the Subdivide option… as we can see, there’s hardly any difference since all the shader information is still applied, but everything runs much more smoothly. Now we have everything ready for export, so let’s go for it.

Final render

Finally, let’s look at several cases that make Marmoset Toolbag an excellent choice for rendering. We’ll start with rendering a still image: 

After posing our character, we import it and adjust the focal length and camera angle for the render. We tweak the lighting slightly to highlight the character’s details and adjust the depth of field to give it a more cinematic look. In the Render tab, we choose the final image dimensions and increase the samples to 512 for higher quality. We check the Safe Frame option to ensure the framing is correct and verify that the render pass we’re generating is the final composition. Now all that’s left is to press the Render button so the program produces the image. 

We can also do basic post-processing directly in Marmoset by adjusting exposure, contrast, sharpening, etc., to achieve a more polished image — but I prefer to make these adjustments in Photoshop. For that, we can export additional render passes to aid in post-processing in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, we play with the background texture, locally expose or overexpose certain areas, apply extra effects using Camera Raw, or add atmosphere with smoke, floating particles, or blurred elements to enhance depth in the composition. All these small touches make the final image feel much more organic and dramatic.

Turntable 

Another super useful option for showcasing our characters is turntable videos. We can create a 360° video of either a static pose or an animation. In our case, we’ll do it with our walking character, so we can also consider some extra points. Once the FBX is loaded, we simply create a turntable by right-clicking in the Scene panel. At first, it seems like nothing happens — our character keeps walking without turning… This is because the turntable works like a folder: everything inside it will rotate, while anything outside stays static. 

In my case, I only want the character and the base to rotate, not the lights or backdrop, so I put just these two elements inside the folder. To ensure we get a seamless loop, I check in CC5 how many frames the animation lasts — in this case, 327 frames — and set that value as the number of frames in Marmoset’s timeline. This gives me the total time, which I can then use to calculate how many degrees it should rotate per second. 

Using a calculator, I divide 360° (a full rotation) by 10.9 seconds (the length of the animation) and change the value accordingly. Now we can check that the first and last frames match perfectly. Once that’s sorted, we can export. Go to the Render tab, choose the video dimensions and sample count, make sure we’re exporting the final composition, and render. This gives us the final result. 

Don’t miss the next tutorial, where we’ll explore some other very interesting examples of what Marmoset Toolbag and CC5 can do.

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