You'd almost have to put a lattice modifier on the whole structure and warp it to the target painting. Love your choice of environments. When I'm in that swamp level of Left 4 Dead 2, I always stop and look at the scenery.*
What's your reference? 20 year olds can look like anyone. It will be hard to udnerstand visually what you're aiming for as a target without some reference images that you're looking at while doing this. Is this for a school assignment as well?
Wow Kiel! So many cool rigs up for sale on your site! I think having this challenge is a great way to find a target audience for them as well ;) Really cool to see you posting regularly. Cheers
Looks great! Just looks like the head, hands are too big. Also the thickness of the legs. The chin/jaw area looks a bit weak. That is compares to the target character, maybe that's your intention. Once again great stuff.
Are you targeting a certain third party baker or using Max's render to texture? If it is the latter I would suggest a completely different route using material IDs. You would then not have to worry about exploding the mesh at all.
Looks like the highpoly and lowpoly are both being baked together as targets. Are you using mentalray as your renderer? I don't use mr for bakes, but I recall there being a need to manually hide the lowpoly faces. That could be it.
I'm surprised by the lack of gay furry porn in the trailer, I think the target audience will be sorely disappointed. Although... his ass did take quite a hammering from some fence posts, I don' think it will be enough.
Added the scales and other small details using alphas, layers and morph targets, I'm thinking of dialling them back though as the muscle definition is getting a bit lost. High res renders below, feedback welcome and appreciated :)
As others have stated from a game artist's perspective, the only worthwhile reason to get a Mac is to be able to publish to Apple's app store. Unless you fancy yourself as a indie developer targeting iOS and a artist then there's no reason to do that.
No way, that means two different high polys, two different low polys and two UV sets. The best way is storing a morph target like Alemja said or just bake the pocket pose just for presentation purposes.