Drowned Crew
I had a lot of fun making it but some things bothered me a bit.
The polycount of the 3 pirates themselves is rather low (5k poly give or take) but what's taking the most of the polycount are the chains. Man these will give me nightmares... What I did is that I modeled in Maya 2 links of the chain, and in Zbrush I used the insert mesh and curve to paint all the chains on top of the characters.
Each link has a pretty low poly count but when there's like 654851415 (not real number 
) it gets pretty high.
As you can see, I stuck with it, but then another problem appeared. I had no idea how to texture the chain.
So I took each chain individually (they are separated to make it easier to work with) and I unwrapped one link of each chain (using UV master in Zbrush) and copied the UV on each other link in each chain, on top of each other. So now when I exported them into maya, I had 13 different UV shells, actually consisting of lot of shells on top of each other.
Problem: As the UV was the same on each chains' links, the texture applied on them would be the same, making it impossible to have the same effect as the other assets on the project. So I moved all the UV shells in the UV space using the layout tool so every link would have it's own texture space. Then I went in Substance Painter, painted the stuff and it looks better than the first one but hell it was a pain in the arse... 
Long story short: In my case, how would make good looking chains that do not kill my polycount and are easy to texture?
Anyway thanks for your help and as always C&C are most welcome. Cheers! 
Replies
For the chains, as you are in a diffuse based render, I would have simply made alpha planes.
At your render's distance, you would barely see the difference, imo.
Cheers
Would you recommend using the alpha planes technique if I make a more realistic character or in that case I could afford using full meshes?
Anyway, thanks for the tip, I'll try it next time I'll have to make chains since I struggeled so much with this... x) But hey it was a fun experience and I learned a lot from it!
Cheers mate
(I forgot to add a sketchfab link... Fixing this right now!)
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