I have a dropbox folder that I organize to my needs. I've set it up in a way that helps me navigate it quickly in terms of the items I usually try to find when I am working. Is that what you mean?
I think your hands and arms will get very tired very quickly, especially if you try sculpting. It might be fun to use normally, but when it comes to art, the precision you get from a tablet just can't be beaten.
Great work everybody, everyone is really making leaps and bounds in their environments. I'm finding this pretty tough going, really rusty on certain stuff but it's all coming back quickly. Blockout is finished, working on some high poly stuff :)
I figure the process would be to quickly rough sculpt, retopo the separate pieces, recompile the high res, and basically bake out a cavity map. Unless this seems unnecessary? Definitely would tackle one of the first questions I had.
did you guys see this http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?162584-Carver-s-Sketchbook-%28tutorial-added-Pg-4%29&p=1030280&viewfull=1#post1030280 pretty clean way to quickly get your guides in place
CrazyBump is better and quicker. What Scott does here with multiple layers and a bunch of different Nvidia filter settings, can be done much more quickly and with instant graphic feedback in CrazyBump. More here. http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#P
Age of Empires Online? It's free-to-play and you can coop on that, if you don't mind an RTS. It's quite slow to start with, but once you're out of the tutorials hit level 5 or so (pretty quick), it builds up quite quickly.
Mostly because maya has a lot of awesome tools and scripts that allow them to hammer out a lot of episodes quickly, I've seen 2d animations make in 3d programs that user bones and weighting as well, there's a lot of advantages too it.
Most definitely. My approach was to carve out things quickly so I can get the shapes right, and then worry about edge flow. Hopefully I haven't painted myself in a corner since that facial topology is pretty gross.
Do I smell a cheap 3d scanner?! :P Would be nice to scan in an object and use it as a guide when starting a model. You could quickly mash something out of playdough, scan it, bring it into max and model over it. :D