That tex is awesome! You can also build your mesh around it to a degree. The base doesn't have to be exactly square does it? Try making a plane, put the tex on it, then use the shape tool to trace around the stones for a non-square shape. Then extrude it for thickness, touch up UV's.
Cool! Really nice concept art. So how have you modelled what you've got so far? Just extruding and pushing verts? And if you are taking it into zbrush, have you kept it all quads and no triangles? - I'm just interested to know how you will carry on.
Hurray!!!! Found a solution how to make faces thickness. Since I have a polygon object plane in the middle of the thickness of transfer will not be easy, not to to splurge on complex modeling, I decided to make the spline in the form of bent lattice and extrude in and add texture with alpha. What happened? See for yourself:
i'd set up a plane to put a reference on. and your model is very boxy, you want smoother more organic shapes in hands. what i do for a hand is start of by creating a 6 sided cylinder and extruding edges as i go. might be something to try out for urself.
do you intend for this to be low poly, or high poly (subdivided)? it appears as if you started with one method, and got lost in the other doing a series of random extrudes. there are areas of low edge density that need more defined shape, and areas with too many edges that provide no shape at all.
I disagree I think the grill in the back should stay as geometry. Normally those units extrude out from the back of those machines and adds to the sillhouette of the model. I think if that was just a normal map it would always read very flat. Model looks very nice.
I like it! I'd say bring those side bars a bit more, and make the pressure gauges a little more extruded. The bottom makes it look a bit too symmetric with the four cables being perfectly arranged. Just give it a little variable and it could go a long way.
whats the point of the extruded gills? the ankles and feet need beefing up for the size of this guy, really like the shoulder muscle work, you may need to bring that level of detail all the way down to the hands. Theres something wrong with the calves that I cant put in to words atm.
drool. Although it's funny to me how many 'lazy' tricks work so well for the design. -The copy/smooth/make selection/delete inverse/extrude all over the place. I guess really solid planning and topology on the base models really make those flow well.
You can export a copy of your lowpoly which you've extruded/pushed outwards to simulate max's projection cage and use that in xnormal. Or yeah, use the one from inside xnormal. Make sure you save the cage once you've edited it in the viewer, and make sure you check "use cage" in your lowpoly mesh settings.