Hey, I am a 3D Environment Artists with 6 years pro experience under my belt I can say that this video, young fellas, is GOLD. Especially for those starting you can see many of the steps necessary in the 3D world. This video and the quality of information is giving it is just amazing it is for free. What a beautiful era we are living. Thanks J HIll. Keep it up!!

and that's how Blizzard found their newest artist

We are all lucky we get to watch this art work for free

Holy Balls, I love when a piece makes me stop, take a deep breath and prepare myself to experience the art. Great job! This has been a massive help when understanding workflow thanks!

That damn standard brush

Looks great dude!
Theres a few things you mentioned in the groom section that I could give some tips on :)
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- "Xgen doesn't support udims" is quite a common misconception. Xgen actually doesn't care about udims since it uses ptex for its maps (Guides use UVs, but udims are fine).
The actual issue is the maya paint tool not supporting udims, if you are happy to leave maya a commonly recommended workflow is to just paint ptex data directly in mudbox!
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- when your region map was not parting properly for the ear it could be a few things. The region mask looked like it was set to 1 so what I recommend is to have your guides visible while painting regions maps with the solid brush alpha and pen pressure turned off in the tool settings. The reason to have guides visible is just so you know for sure that you have correctly painted every guide in the region. Missing just one guide that is on a different side of the parting makes the region map basically useless.
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- "I think they split grooms like this in production"
We do split grooms all the time in production. primarily grooms are split if the hair properties are completely different or if there are specific requirements in simulation or shading :)
(my personal record for one digi double in a film was around 28 grooms on just the head)
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When you're showing the eyelashes I notice that the mask looks very low res in the maya paint tool. Something you can do to help control this is go to the tool settings and find "assign/edit textures", in there you can bump up the resolution of the map you are painting and later convert to ptex in xgen. If you don't want to do that I personally like to UV the eyelids as their own shell and give them a larger texel density than the rest of the head. For the sake of groom maps this is perfectly fine to do :)
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Last thing, when doing large characters you may notice that the cut modifier is not very sensitive or has very little effect. Thats because the cut modifier works based in real world units (cm) and does not factor in the length of the hair. Something I really like to do is:
"rand(0,0.4) * $cLength"
Adding the multiply by cLength makes it so that the cut modifier adjusts to the length of the hairs it is cutting. So the numbers in the rand become the percentage of the hair you want to cut off. with 0 being cut nothing and 1 being cut all the way to the root.
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Hope this helps mate, the results were looking great!

I really like complete stuff like this. It's a massive documentary about how character artists are

increible

Mind blowing, thats what this video was. Amazing. No words.

i am about to cry after watching this :face-purple-crying:

You are Amazing.

amazing man

I was not expecting this thorough of a video about every part of the process. This is immensely insightful and will help me mimic an effective workflow. Thank you!

Must be satisfying seeing your years of hard work come to together into such a beast of a piece

Pogalm! It's been a while since I've seen a whole video this long in one sitting, really cool work! got many tips from watching this.

5:09 - Interesting you talk about starting center and then radiating visuals outward with some clumps happening. This is very similar to Mind Maps, which are diagrams used to organize info and current thoughts. The similarity between the two is interesting.

Polgalm! This is inspiring to see and makes me want to take another crack at 3D. Fantastic work.

my god you are a great teacher.... amazing  video!

Impressive

Damn thats awesome! great work