I think it’s finally time I properly introduce MetaCal.
Over the past six months or so, most of what I’ve shared here has been focused on my Material Store, a few smaller projects and, more recently, my dental/teeth study. Behind the scenes, however, I’ve been quietly working on something considerably larger.
Apart from a few people I’ve shared progress with along the way, MetaCal has mostly stayed off Socials.
What originally started as an experiment to recreate myself as a MetaHuman gradually turned into a much larger character-art and R&D project — and an opportunity to push well outside my usual environment and prop-art workflows.
Since the earliest version, I’ve worked through facial likeness and anatomy, high-fidelity skin detailing, pore and micro-surface information, custom roughness and subsurface response, eyes, facial hair, piercings, tattoos, dental work, hair, clothing integration and even recreating my own shoes.
The skin became one of the largest R&D exercises. I worked between ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter and Unreal Engine to introduce higher-frequency skin detail, pores, surface breakup, roughness variation and more controlled subsurface response. It was also an interesting exercise in learning when not to add detail — especially when everything still needed to behave convincingly under different lighting conditions.
There is something slightly eerie about spending hours studying your own face in a mirror, jumping back to the computer, changing something by a few millimetres… and then looking back in the mirror again. 😂 After a while, you start questioning which one of you is actually the reference.
Hair was another challenge entirely.
Rather than disappearing down the considerably larger rabbit hole of building a complete groom from scratch in XGen, I started with a hair asset from 3DScanStore and treated it as a foundation. From there, a substantial amount of adaptation was required to make it work specifically for MetaCal — correcting scale, repositioning and reshaping hair cards, fitting the groom to the head, refining the hairline, crown, fade and silhouette, adjusting clumping and flyaways, and tuning the final material response.
It was a good reminder that production isn’t always about building every component from zero. Sometimes the more useful skill is knowing how to take an existing resource and successfully integrate, modify and art-direct it into exactly what the project requires.
The tattoos brought their own set of problems: projection, seams, stretching and distortion across the arm all needed to be solved while keeping the artwork believable from multiple viewing angles. The piercings also went beyond simply placing accessories onto the character, including geometry modification around the ears to properly accommodate the tunnels.
The shoes brought me back into much more familiar territory. I remodelled them over the original reference geometry, effectively rebuilding the asset with my own clean mesh and UVs, then transferred the source information through a high-to-low workflow before taking everything through Substance 3D Painter.
By the end of that process, the original asset was essentially a reference and data source — the resulting geometry, UV layout, materials, stitching, wear and final presentation had become my own production asset.
That experimentation is probably what I’ve enjoyed most about MetaCal. It hasn’t just been about producing a digital version of myself. I’ve been using the character as a platform for R&D across character art, scan-derived workflows, modelling, texturing, materials, lighting and Unreal Engine — while bringing a lot of what I’ve learned from environment and prop production into an entirely different discipline.
Clothing is currently the next major pass. The Substance project is already prepared and ready for material work, after which I’ll move into the final refinement, assembly and presentation inside Unreal Engine. Normally I might wait until every last piece was finished before showing something like this, but considering how much of the project has happened completely behind the scenes, I think this is a pretty good point to finally put it out there.
Looking back at the earliest version and comparing it with where the character is now has been incredibly satisfying.
Still some work ahead — but MetaCal has come a very long way. 👀
This latest update focuses on refining the overall presentation and realism of MetaCalvin as the project moves further into its polish phase. The character now features improved clothing materials, including a newly textured hoodie with a functional zipper, secondary colour variation, and subtle dirt passes to better match real-world wear. Additional surface breakup has also been introduced across the skin to reduce the overly pristine appearance and improve believability under different lighting conditions.
Presentation renders have shifted toward a more cinematic direction, showcasing the character in a populated scene while highlighting the current state of the likeness. Remaining work is now largely focused on small refinements, with the eyelashes identified as the primary area that could benefit from additional polish, although the current implementation is already presentation-ready.
With all of the individual elements finally coming together, I also ran MetaCal through a selection of Mixamo animations to see how the completed character would behave outside of a static pose. These quick Toolbag renders are a small glimpse at the character in motion, while also giving me a chance to test the overall assembly across a much wider range of poses and silhouettes.
