Bloom - Normals & AO bakes

Finished baking normal maps and AO maps. Used xnormal. Tried handplane but with worse results. The gun was annoying because I couldn't explode the low poly (due to the high poly having details that I did in zbrush ontop of the original maya hp version) so I had to bake each piece separately so that the ray casts didn't interfere with eachother. So I just took the parts and combined them together in Photoshop for both the normals and AOs.

also, i sculpted the iris detail. actually i did this on my les parapluies de cherbourg image from year 2 but from a drawn texture. 

Bloom - Retopology

normal map + uv preview

I finished the retopology and the UV's. I'm just currently moving shells into the 1-1 space rather than using separate UV sets as I'm not entirely confident with what programs support them. i decided i'll be using dDo for texturing as it's basically a built in bridge with Photoshop and works seamlessly. I'm baking normals and AO maps right now. Going to bake & work at 4k then scale down to 2k in final.

The model is overall 80k tris. (including holsters + guns) I worked to FFXV's polygon count of around 100k polys per character + 20k allocated to the hair alone.

Hair makes up about 19k on mine.

The two suit parts, armbands, glove, and bow part are one combined mesh, and combining the fancy raised part with the vertical striped underlayer was probably the most challenging thing to do and was laborious to say the least. As I worked on it I began to think that it's probably conclusive of not much thought on my part going into the design process. If this was a lower poly character I would not have been able to get this same raised effect in the silhouette. (One that is minimal at best regardless, and especially from far away) Learning experience ! Furthermore I was worried about baking a normal map, but I tried especially hard to respect smoothing groups. The edges of the model where the objects usually break up have hard edges and are separate UV islands. Thus I am having no problems with baking. (when using cages properly, that is)

example, low poly left baked normals on right (not final bake version) 

Bloom - Guns + Holsters

Made the gun by going from high poly box modelling to the low poly by optimizing. It was a learning experience for sure! I wish I knew how to use 3ds Max too now.
Also finished the holsters, and consequently the rest of the high poly so I'm moving onto the retopology now. (Guns look dodgy in zbrush as I was using the lowpoly as light placeholders.)
As I made the lowpoly of the holsters in maya first the lowpoly is done for those too : D

Bloom - Detailing Part 2

The detailing work I have done today! I tried to make the patterns flattering. It was done by just drawing a mask onto the outfit and then extruding it out, z-remeshing and then reprojecting details so that it wouldn't be jagged. In my head I wanted it to have the look of those squishy stickers you can sometimes buy.. 

Bloom - Detailing Part 1

I wanted to share some of the detailing work i've been doing today! Mainly: Skin, the padded/lined underlayer she wears and gloves/armband thing. i'm going to leave the hair as it is because it's only being used here for reference for when I make hair cards. i also retopo'd the satin above layer of her leotard thingamajig so I can manually go around and line the border without it looking bad. (on the blockout it was pixely because i used the inflate deformation on the pre-created bordermask left from extracting.)

ah and i made her jaw and head in general smaller. the eyes are also slightly different. I tried to respect my own concept art a little more. the hands were made smaller too. : ) now featuring her 90's shoulderpads wooooo