I plan to revisit this to fix anything that comes up once when I create the animated UI for Unreal. But right now I need to start on some weapon props for potential jobs.
I started on 3D Studio release 2 in DOS in 1991. We used r4 on the Blade Runner game, Zork Nemesis, many others. That was before they moved to Windows and started with Max.
game dev has been around for decades, but no one's been able to automate game-ready retopology that matches an artist's hand, I think they're up against a decent challenge. Also whoever wrote that art test listing sounds like a wanker.
avoiding poles is generally more of a movie pipeline kinda thing that applies do deforming meshes. in the sense of a highpoly model for game context the important question is, does it shade well? if it does (like in your case on a flat surface, it doesnt matter).
for the lowpoly it also is more a matter of convenience while working on the asset, in engine, everything is triangles anyways, so whatever works, if it looks good.
@EarthQuake : the ethical issue comes from the scraping and ingesting of the original dataset, all done without without consent. Custom models fed with one's own art are mere fine tuning on top of that.
The scale of it is simply so massive that it makes it hard to fathom really ; so for the sake of illustrating it, here's a screenshot from HaveIBeenTrained. This screenshot happens to show a positive from one of my own self-searches, but that's hardly relevant - the thing that makes ones head spin is the sheer amount of art that has been used without consent. Without these images used in LAION the AI generators would output *nothing* - yet none of the authors or IP holders received any notice about their property being used. And that's not even mentioning the use of pictures from social media, medical records, porn (and of course revenge porn), and so on ...
BTW this is not an attack on @Shrike of course - as a matter of fact it would be hypocritical for me to do so as I too was playing around with these tools last year ... until I learned how they actually work, and how they constitute art theft on a massive scale.
If anything I hope this helps clarifies it. And for that alone I do believe that the experiment presented in this thread has value.
The tech is of course fascinating on a technical level, but the end doesn't justify the means. It's up to us as artists to decide whether we want to live in a world where we throw our principles of mutual respect out of the window in the name of art FOMO.
work on the ears and back of the head to get it roughly at the same level of detail as the face. Study the skull; the ear hole is an important landmark for judging proportions. Flesh and fat hangs off of bone through gravity. Carve out mouth and eye cavities, and make separate meshes for eyes, teeth, tongue. Don't sculpt eyebrows directly onto the face, have them be a separate mesh like you did with the mustache and beard, so you can hide the eyebrows and work on the brows.
It looks like you're working in blender - idk if it has subdivision levels like Zbrush, but if it does use it
Personal opinion, combing different props into one texture atlas should be somewhat automated and done at the end, like HLODs in UE.
But, there's some situations where you could use a trim sheet to create a bunch of props quickly from one texture, and that's efficient in both performance and time.
But there's also situations like a vending machine, don't break up the textures of all the items in the vending machine, treat it like one asset.
Do some brainstorming, what problems have you run into in your projects that's made you go 'this is really tedious'?
It's a bit trivial (and I actually have my own scripts for it), but I wish there were simple and usable command line tools for many 'trivial' image processing tasks, like cropping, scaling, channel packing, etc. alongside some generation utils like uniform fills. I often don't want to open PS or Substance just to make a test texture or tweak it a little bit. ImageMagick gets most of the way but it's a usability nightmare (maybe in part because it's trying to do too much...)
Implementing some of this from first principles in like C/C++/Rust would be a good portfolio demo, I feel.
In general I think the only thing we can really say is a best practice is that you should not do anything destructive if you cannot clearly demonstrate why it is needed, and even if you have a good explanation why, assume that in the future you'll learn something new which may necessitate changes, so keep version available which will make do-overs as painless as possible.