3D character texturing and shading

Low-poly 3D character texturing and shading, fanart of Triss from The Wicher serial.

Workflow that consists of baking the textures in Substance Painter.from a high-poly model and applying them to a low’poly model for video games.

Low-poly 3D character texturing

The most important in a low-poly 3D character texturing is to get a good UV unwrap.

Various workflows could be used to get a high-poly model from a low-poly one or vice versa, such as ZBrush but the UVs should remains the same.

Low-poly 3D Character Shading Pipeline

In the images you can see Arnold render in Maya, but really a realistic rendering engine based on Monte Carlo is not the fate of a low poly 3D character.
You can see bottom a test in a Real Time render Engine.

Real Time Render Engine

Search for your better pipeline such as:
Maya > ZBrush > Substance Painter > Maya > Unreal Engine.

From Substance Painter you can choose how to export the textures according to the destination of your pipiline, be it Unity 3D, Unreal Engine, etc.
These render engines are free, with a license we will have access to more content, of course.

You can get free student license of Substance Painter here