A method and apparatus for generating a virtual character, an electronic device and a computer readable storage medium are provided. The method includes: performing mesh simplification on an initial model of a virtual character to obtain a mesh-simplified model; obtaining a first target model by performing white model mapping rendering on an area of each material type on the mesh-simplified model, and obtaining a second target model by performing hyper-realistic rendering on the area of each material type on the mesh-simplified model; and establishing a bidirectional mapping between the first target model and the second target model, and obtaining a target virtual character through iterative updating of the bidirectional mapping.