I scan it in rush as it was a random find during hike. I was gonna discard it but decided to continue with it as I wanted to RnD my own photogrammetry workflow so it was perfect, plus I love its pattern design so salvaged it as much as I could. Challenge was to make new unique details to be cohesive with overall scan. Still a lot more to do so stay tuned!
I used variation of exploding method - fifth wheel that is away from the car, just far enough to not get affected by chassis. Other wheels have their UVs moved 1 tile away so they won't affect baking, but use same texture area.
Imho only good reason to have a wheel on its own texture is to allow more details/pixels.
Game testers (QA) are not asked for their opinions on visuals. If anything that would be somewhat disrespectful of the work of the art team, and IMHO a good AD should be proactive at shielding the art team from such unsollicited feedback, even if it comes "from above".
Also, while creative decisions are definitely influenced by the background noise of pop culture (and as said american movie and game studios are reaping what they sow here), believing that any of this is done to please "sHaReHolders" is a massive stretch.
The only thing to blame here is the willingness of studios to paint themselves in a corner because of increasingly heavy tech that prevents iterations - ultimately slowing down development to a crawl.
Just because "4K" (meaning 4096*4096 really) is a thing doesn't mean that using "4K textures" is necessarily enough to carry something like a full character on screen. If anything, conservative/old school techniques consisting of splitting sheets logically and tightly is very much current and will not become irrelevant anytime soon.
PR videos or "breakdowns" from youtube tech commentators claiming that this or that new engine feature allows to not worry about this or that aspect of asset authoring anymore are either just misleading marketing ... or claims from people who have never worked on a game asset, ever.
For instance here is the texture breakdown of a hero character that someone extracted from Marvel Rivals. The incredible visual quality of the characters in the game comes more from the strict and clean approach taken than from textures being "4k". As a matter of fact the individual textures are 2048 max ; but of course *as a whole*, the character is very high res both model- and texture-wise. The results are really quite stunningly beautiful IMHO, both at native res in character select as well as scaled down during third person gameplay.
Doing things that way is also very beneficial in production. For instance the way the flesh parts of the upper body have their own dedicated 2048 sheet undoubtedly makes it very easy to edit/update/replace them if needed without having to deal with other irrelevant parts of the character.
So in many ways things haven't changed much over the last 10 years of game art evolution : breaking things down cleanly and logically remains the way to make well optimized high-end assets looking great on screen and up close.
(And for assets that do fit within a single 4096 or 2048 layout, it is always a good idea to divide the UVs/texture sheets into even quadrants regardless as this allows for splitting or re-atlasing things later if needed).
This is a character I've been working on for a while. Mostly inspired and tried to aim GTA characters as inspiration. Used Blender for only Hair tool plugin which is really helpful for creating exactly what I want in a versatile way. Polycounts -36k for all hair, facial hair, eyebrows and eyelashes(I didn't removed inside hair for portfolio showcase reasons) -5.3 k for weapon -56k for the rest of the character including items -Total 98k polygons and 193k tris Hope you like it.Thanks.