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Carter Sheffield
Senior 3D Character Artist Looking for Work
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Parker (Game Ready Character) Realistic Unity URP

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Overview
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This project was a personal challenge to push realistic character rendering inside Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline rather than relying on HDRP. My goal was to achieve convincing skin, natural looking hair, and believable eye details entirely in real-time, while staying mindful of performance constraints and optimization on the rendering side. This character is a portrait of my brother who I utilized to capture a face scan from and create a likeness from. I then transferred that data onto a custom base mesh I made that maximizes texel density and allowed me to centralize more polygons in the face than the rest of the body.
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Shader Development
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All primary surface shaders were built on top of the LUX shader library and extensively modified in Shader Graph. I restructured and expanded the skin, hair, cloth, eye, and lacrimal shaders. The original LUX shaders included Pre-integrated sub surface scattering which i utilized for the eyes and skin. I also integrated Screen Space Global Illumination support for the shaders to use with HTrace's URP SSGI with the help of a small Ai custom function added to the shader graphs.
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Textures and Assets
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The skin textures were generated from photogrammetry data I captured and processed, then blended with additional resources from DAZ and Character Creator 5 to complete the body. The hair was modified from the “Alma” hair pack and reworked to support CC5 hair textures along with my custom shader setup.
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Rigging
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I used Auto Rig Pro to generate the Rig and heavily customized it from there for my custom base mesh and handled the weight painting in Blender. It uses a 4 bone max per vertex influence, again, to simulate production-ready use. Stay tuned for my Rig breakdown later.
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Feel free to reach out with any questions regarding this post. I'm also open to taking on new projects.

I added simluated peach fuzz to the edges of his face. They use transmission to fake the lighting. No actual peach fuzz hair cards. You can see them here on the left side of his cheek.

I added simluated peach fuzz to the edges of his face. They use transmission to fake the lighting. No actual peach fuzz hair cards. You can see them here on the left side of his cheek.

The ear sub surface is probably slightly too strong still in certain lighting.

The ear sub surface is probably slightly too strong still in certain lighting.

There is only one 8k cavity map and a 4k normal map however the cavity map is ultra compressed and shared between all characters. You could probably cut the 4k normal map down to a 1k but it does add nice detail for the close up shots.

There is only one 8k cavity map and a 4k normal map however the cavity map is ultra compressed and shared between all characters. You could probably cut the 4k normal map down to a 1k but it does add nice detail for the close up shots.

He i also added a custom depth occlusion mesh for the hat to realistically shadow the face. Standard light shadow maps tend to produce light bleeding. You can see there is still some at the edge of the hat brim on face but it is much less noticeable.

He i also added a custom depth occlusion mesh for the hat to realistically shadow the face. Standard light shadow maps tend to produce light bleeding. You can see there is still some at the edge of the hat brim on face but it is much less noticeable.

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