2 Idea and scribbles
A hand that walks like a person is surreal; at 8.5 m it becomes a creature you want to hide from. That led to the idea of a safe zone the giant can only walk around.
3 Process – tasks as pictures
The character went through a classic game-art pipeline: sculpt, retopology, UVs, bake, texture, rig, weights, animation and engine integration. Each step was checked with review renders before moving on. Section 7 states for every step who made it and with which tools.
Sculpt (ZBrush)
Blocked out from simple shapes, then sculpted at final size: knuckles, tendons, nails, knees and ankles.
Retopology and UVs (Blender)
25,242 triangles, with extra loops at all joints; 6 UV islands at an even texel density.
Bake and texture (Blender, Substance Painter)
Normal, AO and curvature maps baked at 4096 px; skin painted in layers (tone variation, redness, creases, veins, nails).
Rig and walk cycle (Blender)
Generic rig with 21 bones. The walk is a heavy 48-frame loop.
Unity and Holodeck
The Holodeck only accepts the Built-in pipeline and AssetBundles without scripts, so the walk and the idle motions are baked into animation clips. I then finished the layout by hand. Arches between the towers and a canyon path were tried and dropped.
4 VR impressions – Holodeck
Inside the safe zone the giant is only visible in fragments between the rocks, which makes its size physical.
5 Results
• Character: 25k triangles, one 4K material, 21-bone rig, looping walk cycle.
• Scene: a giant circling five sandstone towers, two guards and a sitting hand in different sizes and skin tones, boulders, background rocks and a 360° desert.
• Experience: the audience shares a hiding place and watches the creature together.
What I learned: scale changes everything (curiosity at 3.4 m, threat at 8.5 m), platform limits shape design, and reviewing every step with renders catches errors before they reach VR.
6 External assets and AI content
Created by me: I came up with the concept, made the design decisions and drew the sketches, and I reviewed every stage. I sculpted the hand in ZBrush and painted the skin textures in Substance Painter. I also did the final layout of the scene in Unity by hand: I duplicated the rock towers into background groups and placed the hands.
AI-generated (Claude Code by Anthropic): the following were generated by AI on my instructions, and I reviewed and corrected them:
retopology, UVs, baking, the rig, skin weights and the walk cycle in Blender;
the C# script that builds the Unity scene, which I tested and changed through several versions;
the scripts that made the environment textures and packed the textures.
I also used AI to help with planning and troubleshooting and to draft this document, which I edited.
External sources: The reference images were used only for reference and do not appear in the project. I used the Lightshape HCC AssetBundle Exporter and Unity’s built-in shaders as provided. I did not use any models, textures or animations from an asset store.
