The normal map appears to be right. I'm pretty sure it got something to do with your vertex normals. Try selecting all vertices (before binding the mesh to the bone) and averaging/smoothing their normals. It's that or something weird is going on with your UVs.
Awesome work! Some of the paneling is a bit lumpy around the cheeks, and the forehead: You could fix it with some vert tweaking, or by just putting less vertices down when you do your retopo and let the subdivision do the work.
thanks :P I'm selecting vertices and assigning them to links, every time I fix one I find a few others which are doing something funky. I will try painting weights, maybe it could be faster or easier.
If you don't want to use Chuggnuts tools, try Fat Assasins' scripts. The most useful ones for me have been horizontal and vertical align, bind them to a short cut key and you'll have straight edges instantly.
You might want to check out the centre of gravity on that - in the turnaround he is going to fall backwards. Also, he is very vertical - grab a soft selection and pull a few gentle curves into the upright shape like the image on the right here:
I'm guessing those cuts are for horizontally tiling textures? maybe? Looking nice so far, I would bust up the vertices even more. Irregularity! Also consider adding more sections to the 8-sided torus window.
I didnt model it at an angle. I just moved it for a render not thinking and didnt save an instance of the original in a vertical position.. How do you align a face to another face in max? I have never done that before.. Thanks..
Which is a good idea if you don't go batshit insane, plan properly and stay realistic (NO MMO SHIT). We just about spent 15k on Warsoup now and we're only one month away from the vertical slice.
The Evoluent vertical mouse is great for reducing wrist strain. The build quality doesn't seem to be particularly amazing - the right mouse button got sticky after a bout a year of fairly heavy use, but I really miss using it now.
SketchUp is a bit notorious in both archviz and gamedev worlds, for generating terrible meshes. Duplicate vertices, bad normals, etc. Blender is indeed worth another look. However you may also prefer the halfway-CAD workflow of 3ds Max; worth a serious look.