This week I sat down with Juan Hernandez to dig into his Stitch project. A work that looks like it belongs in a film. The twist? It's made by one person entirely in Blender and ZBrush, pushing free tools to produce results that rival studio pipelines.
We talk about:
🧵 Why Stitch?
Juan chose Stitch because the character was both nostalgic and technically demanding. He wanted to push himself with retractable forearms, which introduced the problem of rigging and grooming around disappearing limbs, and with fur that needed to read believably at film quality. He considered Crash Bandicoot, but a recent Disney teaser gave him the motivation to explore Stitch in his own way, free from studio constraints, with all the creative freedom of fan art.
Key takeaway: Pick projects that inspire you emotionally and challenge you technically. The combination keeps you motivated when things get tough.
🎨 Process & Timeline
The project took 6–8 weeks of nights and weekends. Juan followed a full character pipeline: blocking out shapes in ZBrush and Blender, cleaning with careful retopology, setting up UVs for flexibility, texturing in Substance Painter, and pulling everything together in Blender for final rendering. His background at Framestore shaped his approach. Moving fast while aiming for the highest quality. He didn’t try to shortcut the process but instead built each stage with enough care that later steps flowed smoothly.
Key takeaway: Treat personal projects like productions. A clear pipeline and discipline let you finish big ideas without burning out.
💻 Tools in Play
Blender was the center of the workflow, with Juan’s RTX 4090 making 4K renders possible in about a minute per frame. Geometry nodes handled grooming, while AutoRig Pro simplified complex rig setups. He used Marvelous Designer to create natural folds in clothing before refining them in ZBrush, and multiple UV sets let him reuse detail, transfer data, and mirror work where needed. Instead of relying on one “magic” program, he connected tools into a flexible pipeline that let him work quickly while still producing film-quality results.
Key takeaway: The power of a workflow isn’t in one tool, it’s in how you connect them to serve your project.
🐾 Grooming & Anatomy
Fur was the star of the project, but Juan knew the groom would only succeed if the anatomy underneath was exaggerated and intentional. He studied koalas, since Stitch’s design is based on them, but found their fur to look “like an ugly rug.” So he blended references from expressive dogs and puppies to create something cuter and more believable. By over-sculpting muscles, wrinkles, and landmarks, he ensured that detail would show through once the dense groom covered the surface. The fur itself was built in layers, with guide hairs placed carefully around problem areas like wrinkles and fingers, then interpolated into clumps and varied with noise for natural irregularity.
Key takeaway: Great grooms depend on what lies beneath; exaggerate anatomy and guide flow so the fur feels alive.
🎥 Cinematic Presentation
Juan approached presentation like a director. Instead of a static turntable, he posed Stitch differently for each shot, tilting cameras, placing rim lights, and even simulating anamorphic bokeh in Blender. He added imperfections like chromatic aberration, lens distortion, and subtle noise in Photoshop to ground the images in reality. His goal wasn’t to show every polygon but to create the illusion of an actor in a scene. He thought of Stitch as a performer and let some shots obscure details in service of mood and story.
Key takeaway: Present characters like actors on set; lighting, lenses, and imperfections make them believable.
⚙️ Toughest Problem: Arms
The retractable forearms were the hardest technical problem. Juan couldn’t simply hide them. The fur needed to behave consistently. His solution was to duplicate the mesh, rig a 30-frame animation of the arms collapsing inward, and sculpt corrective shape keys for problem areas. He cached this version as an Alembic file, then wrapped the final hero mesh to follow it. This gave him full control, avoided broken grooms, and even created small natural details like dimples in the skin where the arms tucked away.
Key takeaway: Complex deformation challenges are solved with layered strategies: animation, caching, and corrective shapes working together.
📚 Working Smarter
One of Juan’s biggest lessons was rigging earlier in the process. Traditionally, rigs come after modeling and texturing, but he found that introducing them sooner let him test deformations, expressions, and even inside-mouth sculpts without painful rework later. He also discovered the value of baking groom setups for performance, and of using UDIM symmetry tricks to cut down texture work. These adjustments gave him more freedom to iterate instead of starting over when problems surfaced.
Key takeaway: Build tests into your process early. Small rigging and grooming setups save you from major rework later.
🔑 To His Younger Self
Looking back, Juan would tell himself not to obsess over “perfect” topology or whether his methods aligned with industry standards. No studio ever hired him because of a clean quad layout, they hired him because his work looked strong. He learned skills incrementally, project by project, focusing on results over theory. His advice is simple: have fun, make things that excite you, and share them widely. That’s what has opened every door in his career so far.
Key takeaway: Stop chasing perfection. Consistent, joyful creation will carry you further than perfect theory.
Bottom line
Juan’s Stitch project is more than fan art, it’s proof that combining efficiency, curiosity, and cinematic presentation can turn a personal project into something film-quality. His approach reminds us to push technically, but also to keep it fun and treat our characters like living actors.
👉 Listen to Episode 6 on Youtube
🎙️ Apple Podcasts
🎙️ Spotify
🎙️ Amazon Podcasts
Be sure to check out Juan's work!
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