heh cool stuff, i like how the face is progressing. nrek's paintover with the bag is exactly what i was trying to suggest originally, I think it'd really help give it some "weight" instead of just looking like it's floating at his side.
I believe Twighlight Princess Link was about 6900 tris, if that's any use. But is textured with tons of little textures rather than one big one. A lot of the TP meshes are floating around online, shouldn't be too hard to find with a google search to look at.
I am still new to normal mapping but wouldn't it be better to have the indent on the blade floating and just bake it it? That way you wouldn't have the triangles in the corners and it would save on ploy's. *UPDATE* I just read BigJohns post and he already mentioned it.
OK, I decided to go ahead with the UV's because I'm keen to work on the High poly, I love how the UV's turned out : There's two bloody tri's that are floating around up the top of the UV layout, I'll have to track 'em down!
Better but the lighting looks weird especially in the second to last screenshot. Are you using dynamic lighting? Also, the ivy on the building doesnt have any shadow so its just floating there. Try increasing shadow resolution or adding contact shadows.
Might even be just floating geometries with vertex/map alpha on some of those screenshots. It was already used for sure on N64. (I was so impressed back then xD) Note that we still use this approach, for "breaking" 90 degrees angles on walls for instance. Maybe splatting was a bit heavy for those platforms as it requires…
I added that circle because I mirrored the uvs of the car so it had no fuel cap. I noticed a bit late in the process, and as I was going to bake it into a plane decided to just leave the floating geo as it is as it just adds 96 tris.
Tor Frick is on a whole different level from Justin Marshall. If you see differences in how they approach Modo, I'd favor Tor's method. Intersecting geometry is perfectly fine on hard surface models, and the floating bits are used for baking normals.
I see what you did there... @Johnnynapalm Well you know our side of things and it seems like you got a lot of feedback from the community as well so there's plenty of opinions floating around but ultimately the decision lies with you.
Had a look at your blend file and I think that's what it was. I don't see those 'stains' in my current development version of TexTools as it now bakes everything as 32 bit float values. next version will be out this weekend or today.