Battle Ogre - Unreal 5 full body mocap character

In this personal project I wanted to apply myself to the creation of a whole humanoid character ready for full performance motion capture (body, hands and facial expressions) through Rokoko Suit or HTC Trackers.
I wanted to study the full pipeline, from the initial high poly sculpt, to retopology, unwrapping, texturing, rigging and integration in UE 5.2.
The creature is a mix I made taking inspiration from two concepts: one by Denis Rybchak for Plarium RAID and another by Aleksi Briclot.
Thanks to Sergey Chesnokov (Outsourcing Art Lead at DICE EA) for mentoring me in the whole sculpting and texturing phases. It has been a great learning experience, and I practiced a lot the feedback and improving process.

I chose 3D-Coat as high-poly sculpting tool because I had already experience with ZBrush and I wanted to get better in 3D-Coat, that permit several interesting voxel-based techniques. I still provided always a ZBrush version to the art director for feedback.
I made the retopology in Blender, because it's a software I'm very proficient with. For UV unwrapping and packing I used ZenUV and UVPackmaster addons. Character has 2 4K textures (UDIM setup) and weapon has a different 2K texture set with the same texel density.
Rigging and weight painting in Blender, using AutoRigPro addon.
I textured the materials in Substance Painter, creating color, roughness, metallic, height and subsurface maps in addition to the baked normals.

I chose Unreal Engine 5.2, because it uses the new OpenXR plugin instead of the previous and discontinued SteamVR plugin as interface with HTC VR controllers and trackers. The character has a custom skeleton, similar to UE5 mannequin but with additional bones to drive some of the items hanging from the hips.
I created a postprocess animation blueprint that moves automatically the bags, the chest on the back, the wheel, the blades... following main animation and providing a more natural feeling. I also configured the tunic to move through cloth simulations. I created the IK rig in Unreal and the retargeter from the default mannequin. With this setup, default animations for Unreal Mannequin can be easily retargeted.
Thanks to the MegaMocapVR project I've also created the blueprints that can drive the character with motion captured by HTC Vive Trackers and controllers. Facial performance can be added at the same time with an iPhone and LiveLink.

The cover image has some light overpainting (with Clip Studio Paint), while all the other images and videos are unaltered from Unreal Engine, 3D-Coat and Blender.