Stuart Counter

Stuart Counter

https://www.artstation.com/stupot

Personal Profile:

A skilled character artist specializing in realistic and fantasy character creation. I am continually developing my craft through hands-on experience, private study, and industry-leading courses such as Sefki Ibrahim’s 'Hyperreal 3D Character Creation.' Passionate about blending technical precision with creative vision to produce compelling assets for games, films, and media.

Software familiarity:

3D Modeling & Sculpting: Maya, ZBrush, Topogun
Texturing: Substance Painter, Mari, Mudbox, Photoshop
Rendering: Marmoset, Maya Arnold
UV Mapping: Unfold3D, Headus UV Layout, Wrap3
Pipeline Tools: ShotGrid, P4V
Others: Marvelous Designer, Substance Designer, XNormal, Knald

Dedicated this period to advancing my technical skills and artistic expertise while prioritizing personal growth and health. Key achievements include:

Enrolled in Sefki Ibrahim’s "Hyperreal 3D Character Creation" course, focusing on creating lifelike characters with hyperrealistic textures and anatomy.

Significantly improved my proficiency in Substance Designer, developing advanced workflows for creating detailed, realistic textures.

Applied new techniques to complete the Kathoga ArtStation project, showcasing expertise in texturing, detailing, and hyperrealistic workflows.

Consistently engaged in self-directed learning and exploration of cutting-edge industry practices to enhance my capabilities further.

This dedicated period of development has sharpened my skills and prepared me to deliver exceptional results in future projects.

Character Artist Airship Images November 2020 – May 2023

At Airship Images I worked on numerous titles including Star Trek Fleet Command, Forza Horizon 5, PGA Golf, Warhammer Darktide, Fall Guys and Gotham Knights.

Responsibilities:

Modelling and texturing character head and body portraits with and without scan data

Modelling and texturing character costumes, or individual clothing assets including occasional hard surface assets, with and without the use of Marvellous Designer.

Retopology, Texture baking in Substance Painter or Marmoset, creating LODs, UV's and on one occasion animated normals.

Creating PBR textures typically using Substance Painter and including Albedo, Normal, AO, Metallic and Roughness maps.

Presenting Assets for client review in app or in render engines including Marmoset and Unreal

Creation of occasional complete hair assets from scratch and working at various stages in a pipeline on numerous others.

Creation internal documentation and training other staff joining a project in the clients pipeline as required.

Working on client systems such as P4V, and updating asset status and hours on Autodesk Shotgrid.

Experienced Character Artist Codemasters Jan 2020 - May 2020

Responsibilities:

I processed a Full head scan from images including the image processing using camera raw and Angisoft and created a game ready model with textures from the scan data.

Creation and also sometimes design of Liveries (unique textures for drivers)

Creation of game ready costumes for background characters using Marvellous Designer as part of the pipeline

Modification of head and body assets in ZBrush to create unique characters

On one occasion I provided feedback to outsourcers.

Rigging a character using a proprietary tool and then skinning it

Bringing a character and character rig into Unreal for presentation, creating my own skin shader in Unreal with nodes and a tintable shader for the livery I created the same way.

Creating a texture Atlas for a character in order to optimize the game.

Freelance Character Artist July 2015-August 2020

As a freelance artist I worked for various different clients including 2CGVFX, Agora Studio, Villaflour Wilson Media LLC, Metapixel and Digital Preservation Inc. Notable projects included Star Trek Discovery, Sleepy Hollow, The Crew 2, The Golf Club, Welcome To Marwen with Steve Carell, and Marvels Cloak and Dagger.

Modelling and texturing character head and body portraits with and occasionally without scan data, sometimes I did the whole process end to end sometimes we split the process between artists. In the case of Welcome to Marwen I processed over 60% of the scans for the full range of expressions in the facial action coding system (FACs) for 2 characters.

Modelling and texturing character costumes, or individual clothing assets including occasional hard surface assets, with and without the use of Marvellous Designer.

Occasionally Design including a concept specifically I designed and modelled a sci fi fantasy weapon and footwear as well as a mock up visualisation of some military equipment for a sales proposal.

I worked for 2 seasons (3 and 4) on the TV series Sleepy Hollow recreating practical creature effects in CG from scan data. In many cases I was tasked with creating custom topology for humans/humanoids and their clothing as well as for creatures with snouts, long ears, tentacles and so fourth , one particularly complex re topology involved a tree like creature, another involved a cloak for a wraith which did not scan properly. Typically this was for television but I was also responsible for creating custom topology for game meshes and other real time assets as well as custom topology for characters for movie projects on occasion.

Sometimes I also did environment work and the end users included National Geographic, and the Smithsonian Museum.

Software Specific Education and Training:

A total of 44 completed courses with Digital tutors dedicated mainly to the Study of Autodesk Maya

Masterclasses: Sefki Ibrahim Hyperreal 3D Character Creation, Portraiture and Facial Anatomy (Scott Eaton) Cloth Creation and Simulation for Realtime (CGMA) Cloth Sculpt & Design (Petroc Studios) Master Organic Modeling with (Gio Nakpil) Power & Grace The Structure of Man (Sabin Howard) Rythms & Gestures of the figure (Petroc Studios) Female Face Sculpting (Steve Lord) Strong Foundations creating a likeness in clay (Amelia Rowcroft) Life Size Portraiture (The Sculpture School) Building Blocks (Amelia Rowcraft)

Other education:

2:1 BA (hons) Leisure management with Sport Buckinghamshire Chilterns university College

Diploma in personal training and Sports Massage Therapy (premier training international)