Making a Film-Quality Character as a Student | Pixel Peeps | Episode 26

Character artist Leandro Leijnen to breaks down Alvida, one of the main characters from the award-winning animated short Au-delà des mots (Beyond Words). We go through the entire production process—from character design, modeling and texturing to grooming, cloth simulation, rendering and presentation. Leandro also gives us a deep dive into the Houdini setup he built to automate hair and cloth simulations across the film. Au-delà des mots went on to win Best Student Project at SIGGRAPH 2026, and Leandro is now working as a Character Modeler at Illumination Studios Paris. See Leandro’s Alvida project: https://phoerens.artstation.com/proje... Watch Au-delà des mots / Beyond Words: https://creativeseeds.fr/film/au-dela... ► My Game Character Class - http://www.characterclass.com ► Join the Character Art Team:    / artofjhill   🤝 Become a member:    / artofjhill   🤝 Patreon:   / jhill   _________________________________________ ◆ Discord:   / discord   ◆ Newsletter: https://www.characterclass.com/newsle... ◆ My website: https://www.jhill.com ◆ ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/jhill ◆ Instagram:   / @artofjhill   ◆ TikTok:   / artofjhill   ◆ LinkedIn:   / artofjhill   ◆ Setup: https://kit.co/artofjhill/my-setup _________________________________________ 00:00 Intro & Portfolio Presentation 02:01 Creating Au-delà des mots 04:17 Making a Student Animated Film 07:35 Designing Alvida 12:47 Modeling the Character 15:40 UDIMs, Texturing & Guerilla Render 19:10 The Film's Rendering Pipeline 27:34 Texturing in Substance Painter 35:12 Grooming, Cloth & CFX 36:22 Building the Houdini System 39:44 Creating & Simulating the Hair 43:20 Automating Cloth & Hair Simulations 50:36 Creating an Art Book-Quality Presentation 56:01 Biggest Challenges & Lessons Learned 01:01:23 Advice for Young Artists 01:03:04 What He Would Do Differently 01:04:10 Leandro's Next Characters 01:09:25 Final Thoughts & Outro