found it at maxunderground, very well done, lots of nice images and infos http://accad.osu.edu/%7Ewaynec/history/lessons.html interesting way to "render" terrain in old flightsims: they got tons of cool animations too, like 1979's 1337 cgi movies
an older version of max. or try gmax - it's really old but the basics such as poly modeling, UVs, etc. are there and you can keep the basic "max" workflow. or try Silo. Not sure if they still develop it. Blender may work too though.
its even better when I scale up his eyes :P Did some work on a new bark texture for the trees. The old ones were too detailed, so I tried to bring it back a bit.
Getting closer. Maybe lower the roughness a tad on that metal if substance displays metalness right and all those metal areas are marked as metal. Looks all... old-school spec, a bit too plastic-y. Which is weird.
Im more old school, just me an a guitar most of the time, done a couple of gigs round my town recently but Im not too confident yet. http://www.gd3dart.com/music/takecontrol.mp3 http://www.gd3dart.com/music/lightofday.mp3
Those materials are beautiful, Great job on that old metal / paint. I'm not a fan of that sticker though, I think it should be heavily worn down or just taken away all together. It contrasts too much with the rest of the model.
xnormal can do that too, put old mesh into high res. right click on it and attach base texture, and mesh with new uvs into low res. all left to do is tick in baking options to bake base texture :)
I wondered if this was what you going at. It looks bloody awesome, definitely harkens to the prerendered or illustrated backgrounds of old RPGs for me. I don't see it being too hard optimise the process in one way or the other if needed.
Holly Cow ! Thanks Cyrid for this (already old) answer to justifun problem. You can't imagine the time I spent sliding my mouse to scale too big objects because I didn't know about that. Thanks ! :)
Ah yes. The old forced to polish turds situation. Happens way too often. Usually enforced by someone who doesn't understand the art pipeline. Usually managers who lack foresight or don't bother to plan ahead.