Before that though here is the comparison shot of the proportion fixes as promised, I really hate looking at the old ones now, but I learned a valuable lesson from it.
I've got some sculpting left to do on the Ugly and the Bad but I've gotten used to it now so I don't imagine it will take that long but for now I really wanted to take the finished Clint sculpt and texture it.
To start this process I began retopology. For most of the accessories I brought them straight into Max and simply tweaked the base mesh. I chose to keep all the separate geometry floating for a cleaner bake and upon some research found out that this shouldn't be a problem.
Given that my tri budget is 16000 I've been fairly liberal with the geometry and can always preserve the uv's and reduce triangles after the bake. It's important to have a little bit more geometry before the bake to capture as much detail as possible and increase the chances of a clean bake.
For the more organic shapes I used topogun and found out I could use the original base meshes to start things off!
I based my facial topology off many many reference pictures. It doesn't really follow any one picture, but I basically looked at as many face examples as I could find and tried to see what was most common combined with what deformed well. I've tried to keep it simple.
The spur is tiny so an alpha plane seemed appropriate.
I'm no hair expert and I really didn't want to go down the hundreds of alpha planes route so I figured it best to break the hair into larger chunks. The final topology to me looks a bit of a mess, this is due to the triangles around the vest lapels and the folds in the clothing. I did do some research though and this seems to be acceptable given it is within budget. Regardless, nearer the end I will experiment with cleaning it up. For now it works, captures a suitable amount of detail and is 2000 under budget so I can't complain. Really as long as it deforms, that is all that matters. Still I've learned from it, and can incorporate changes into the other two.
In the past I have always been skeptical about the UV Master tool in Zbrush. I've spent many an hour labouring over UV's and couldn't see any other way to do it. However as long as the seams are in place in Max UV Master does an incredible job. Literally saved myself about a day of work there! Once unwrapped I arranged all the UV's into two texture sheets and applied my smoothing groups making sure it read correctly in marmoset.
The baking process was not quick but delivered decent results, I baked all the normal maps separately to keep it clean but baked the AO all together to get the influence of the shadows.
It took quite some time to get to this stage as I was still streamlining this whole process but I'm happy with the result. It's a very clean result and almost looks as good as the high poly! I did play around with photoshop's 3D tools and mudbox to fix a few seams on the inside of the hand but it wasn't the greatest method so I haven't included it here. I used to like the render to texture method in Max but that doesn't seem to work in 2012. I may have to get an older version for the final diffuse clean up later.
Lastly I've just started the flat colours of the diffuse map. In my eyes this is the easiest part of the process. It will still take some time and care, but it's essentially 2D art which is the one thing where I actually know what I am doing!
I will make the proper specular afterwards too.
So that's all for now, I've learned a lot doing this and I really think it's going to make the next two quicker because I will not make the same little mistakes again!
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