It's a very nice piece. Small details like the serial number are nice. Love the wood handle in its dirty version. The blade is very nice too. I would tone down the vertical lines on the blade and made them more subtle like on your ref.
Make the meshes contiguous, as much as possible, this will reduce headaches later when binding the vertices to the bones (skinning). For example, take a look at how the shirt transitions to the pants, or the pants to the shoes. Street Cop by Mashru Mishu. More examples here http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/BodyTopology
Great tips Snader, I think to add to the usefulness of that particular style of texture, it could tile it Vertically, then you can make bamboo any length you want. Or like you said just a small tiling texture in general.
I started off with a poly plane and two cubes- one horizontal, one vertical (for verts to snap to), and extruded, split and snapped the plane to the shape I wanted. Plus some bevel. I do love my bevel :3
and also, this is the blueprint image of the backview of the stock. It was really bothering me that my stock wasn't curved enough but i pulled this up and its pretty much directly lined up with it. Guess its more vertical than i thought...
If you select by Polygon or by Element, you can paint in solid colors. The way this works internally, is the vertices along the edges between polygons get multiple colors per vertex, which ends up looking like a hard edge.
It's 1 vertex for each unique combination of values (color, each UV map, normal, tangent, position, etc...). If you keep the same UV islands (just moved around a bit) you won't be adding any more vertices.
0 equals 4, and 1 equals infinity, and the mapping is not linear, its mapped so that 0.5 looks roughly halfway between 4 and infinity. If you want to know the math: horizontal is gloss value, vertical is blinn-phong exponent
If you have an unwrapped high poly mesh, you can bake the curvature in Substance Designer based on the vertices using the standard Curvature baker. 2 is indeed the exact same thing as 3, but coded in one channel instead of 2.
She is Gorgeous Ysalex! All the time put in to her really show through. A question regarding the braid, did you model it with the plains completely vertical and then skin it to a spline to place it? Or did you model it over the shoulder from the start?