Once you apply IK, you can no longer directly transform any object in the IK Chain. To swivel the knee there are two things you can do: 1. Enable Select and Manipulate and modify the swivel gizmo. 2. Set a Swivel Target object in the motion panel. This is the preferred method.
Not sure this is what you're looking for but you can create a custom envelope using the low poly. Add your low poly to the "Target Mesh" section, add the cage (duplicated low poly and tweaked) to this tab as well, right click the cage file name and set "Use Selection as Envelope".
There. I changed some colors to separate the differente elements better. <a href="https://s28.photobucket.com/user/Olivier_Theriault/media/HeadTopo_339_comp_zpsb70fd8a3.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="https://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c208/Olivier_Theriault/HeadTopo_339_comp_zpsb70fd8a3.jpg~original" border="0" alt="…
Have you considered going to a MediaMarkt, Target, BestBuy or some store where you can touch and feel the keyboard? Just walking past a row of 20 keyboards and trying them out will give you much more valuable information than everything we can tell you.
all depends on the prop and your target hardware (the engine not so much) rule of thumb is use as many/few polys as you "need" to make it look awesome. but more importantly only use one material/shader on your prop and that material shader should be used EVERYWHERE in your scene !
Zbrushes surface noise can produce some great effects as well. The various options used in conjunction with masks and the morph target can yield great results. There is a video on their site which goes over someone doing a stone. Some of the principles may apply. http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/
Yeah, it's not finding the polygons that each vertex should get it's tangent vectors from. So it's instead creating tangents at each vertex for each polygon, target than a normalised sum of all the polygons of the vertex. Unfortunately, I can't use the "fix" because MODO doesn't export tangents and binormals :/
This is probably the oldest we'll get, pretty broken though http://wayback.archive.org/web/jsp/Interstitial.jsp?seconds=5&date=917540363000&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.planetquake.com%2Fq2pmp%2F&target=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F19990128161923%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.planetquake.com%2Fq2pmp%2F
To be fair, even adding the two polls together gives you less than 100 people. It's not what I'd call a representative sample size, you have self-selected answerers, and you're not specifically going after the target audience for the game. You'll only learn so much this way.
The second image is a modern take on old pin ups. The others aren't. But generally it completely depends on what era HeV is targeting, retro is a bit vague considering how long pin up has been around. I still think the character generally doesn't look like a pinup :/