Crimson Ronin by Pierrick Picaut

This course walks you through the entire creation of a PBR stylized character for games, using Blender, ZBrush, and Substance Painter side by side. You’ll go from a rough sculpt to a final, portfolio-ready render in Blender’s Eevee engine. It’s a practical, no-fluff look at how these three tools fit together in a real production pipeline.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Sculpt a complete stylized character and armor in ZBrush
• Model hard-surface assets and retopologize in Blender
• Create optimized UVs and bake maps in Blender
• Texture the character in Substance Painter using PBR workflows
• Pose and render the final character in Blender Eevee

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic knowledge of Blender, ZBrush, and Substance Painter
• Tools: 3-button mouse, drawing tablet
• Hardware: Minimum 16GB RAM, dedicated GPU

📝 Description

This isn’t a beginner course. You should already know your way around Blender, ZBrush, and Substance Painter before jumping in. What you’ll get here is a complete, step-by-step walkthrough of a professional stylized character pipeline.

Pierrick doesn’t skip steps. You’ll see every stage: from blocking out the character and armor in ZBrush, to retopologizing and creating clean UVs in Blender, to baking maps and laying down base textures. Then it’s into Substance Painter for the full PBR texturing pass, and finally back to Blender’s Eevee for posing and rendering.

The course is built around 47 videos totaling over 9 hours of content. Some are detailed step-by-step explanations, others are commented timelapses. All production files are included—ZBrush sculpts, OBJ files, Blender files, Substance Painter projects, textures, references, and HDRIs. You get everything needed to follow along or reverse-engineer the final result.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Intermediate 3D artists who know the basics of Blender, ZBrush, and Substance Painter
• Game artists looking to build a stylized character portfolio piece
• Artists wanting to learn a professional three-tool pipeline for character creation

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Pierrick Picaut is a senior animator at Amazon Games with over 10 years of experience using Blender. He’s a self-taught 3D artist and a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer. He’s been publishing educational content for over 8 years, with multiple successful Blender courses under his belt. His teaching style is detailed, comprehensive, and professionally edited—focused on giving you the practical skills to work in the industry.

🏁 Final Result

• A fully sculpted, textured, and posed stylized character (Crimson Ronin) ready for portfolio presentation
• All production files and project assets for future reference or modification