Mythological Female Character - Complete Game Pipeline

"Yeah, Abe really teaches us what's necessary, and he covers each and every process along with its full game-ready pipeline. If you're looking for that, go for it."

I've taken a couple of Abraham's other courses before, and usually he's pretty good at covering everything in great detail. However, not sure if it's because this is an older course of his, but this particular course has some issues, the main one being he does too much behind the scenes without highlighting it properly. It's still a decent course where you can learn a lot, but if I hadn't already known his workflow from some of his better courses beforehand I would have gotten lost in some parts. The early Zbrush sections are really good, they cover female anatomy quite well and I learned quite a bit from them. The Marvelous Designer section is fairly basic and doesn't have much depth, but gets the job done (would recommend looking elsewhere for a more thorough breakdown though). Retopology is also fairly well done until he hits the section where he goes back into Zbrush for a bit to fix some things. Now the fact that he goes back into Zbrush isn't the issue, it's a thing that's actually really useful to know, but then he kind of skips over the process of getting the refined mesh back into Maya and doesn't even show the step of subdividing and conforming the low poly mesh, you just go to the next video and it's already done with no mention of him doing it (he does mention this being a step earlier in the series, but again he never actually shows it). The texturing stage goes back to being pretty good, and overall I would rank it as great, but it suffers again from him doing some smaller things off camera that he never brings up, so if you don't have a good eye you'd never know that he'd done them (fingernails, redoing some of the tattoos, and giving the scalp a base texture for the hair). The hair section is where this course falls apart for me, it's feels very rushed and not much is shown. He shows you the basics of making a single hair card, then skips ahead showing you the finished hair cards he made and the hair entirely finished, with just a very brief look of how he laid some of them down and how he did the braids. Now of course it would be a waste of time to show the entire process with no breaks, but there needed to be a bit more than what was shown, say show snippets of important aspects as they're being made and then just skip the in between parts. Luckily I have one of his later courses that is entirely focused on hair cards and was able to figure things out by referencing that, but that's not something I should have had to do. In the end, while I do think Abraham is a great teacher based off the other courses I've gone through, this is one of his weaker ones. Overall it's decent, with the anatomy sections being great, but the fact that there's some off camera stuff that isn't covered very well is what drags down the score for me. I'd recommend instead finding some of the courses he did under NextTut, they're a bit more thorough and he does a better job describing what he did off camera.

I've just finished the project and I have a lot to thank Abraham for the excellent course. I learned a lot about the production pipeline of a real time/game ready character. In this course I used for the first time softwares such Substance Painter, Marvelous Designer and Marmoset Toolbag, and the simple and enjoyable way that Abraham Lean teaches makes everything cool and easy to learn. I have posted the project on my ArtStation and social media. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/NGdBkb Again, huge thanks to Abraham and Victory 3D for the amazing course.

Good character course but obviously not for beginners if you are looking for a course in character building this will not be recommended, but if you've been into this industry profoundly and have essential knowledge of Zbrush, Maya and Substance painter you are in the right place.