Introduction
Hi, I am Piotr, a freelance Character Artist for games and cinematics, mainly focusing on Unreal Engine as a render environment. At the moment, I have been working on a long-term contract with Aaron Sims Creative for almost five years already, where I am responsible for modeling and preparing all kinds of assets for cinematic production in Unreal Engine 5, from characters to robots and props.
On the side, I run a small mentorship, where I am helping other artists to grow their skills and make sure they make fewer mistakes along the way. I also started working as a mentor for a think tank training center lately. Whenever I find some free time, I always make sure to improve my own skills as well, always trying new techniques and tools.
I also wanted to state that I am not a professional groomer (yet), so if anything I am saying here doesn’t make sense, feel free to let me know.
While working on this project, I took part in a Houdini workshop with Luis Cadavid and spoke a lot with Artem Erikenov, who both helped me a lot with many aspects, and I want to give them credit for a lot of things I am explaining here.
Project Aim
The purpose of that project was to get more accustomed to Houdini, grooming workflows for different types of hairstyles, and how far it is possible to do procedurally with the least amount of actual grooming.
Skin
Regarding the skin and attribute painting, what I think is worth mentioning, and what was the biggest difference for me coming from XGen, is that everything in Houdini can be procedural. So, for example, when you paint an attribute, it might not be worth painting it with a nice smooth transition from the start, but instead paint it with a sharp line and then use the attribute blur node, so you can have more control over the effect.
