Bad news .... I lost my project files after a HDD Crash :( I have only my highpoly left (God save the Zbrush autosave). But I will bring my character back to life ... so stay tuned folks 8)
Both are valid workflows that will end in a clean Final Char. I like todo a good low blocking model first. Do a Highpoly and create my lowpoyl out of my blocking. Some parts will created with retopo. But Retopo is sometimes slower and not that clean.
Looking good ! But I feel like the arms are too thin, and it makes the armpit area a bit wrong... I think you don't plan to redo highpoly, bakes and so on, but you might be able to tweak the low poly to gain a bit of thickness.
when i did the highpoly modeling for this character, i used a macro i did in blender. it saved a lot of time with it and it's non-destructive too!!!! i though i could share a video of it in action for anyone who's interested: https://youtu.be/wwYDTwHY_Fc
read this entry .. : http://wiki.polycount.com/AmbientOcclusionMap it can really define the smaller details of your mesh, especially if you're working off a highpoly source. lightmaps: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1098043#post1098043 (also grabbed from the PC wiki)
Ideally games companies, but any CG related companies would be great. I'd probably have to tune my portfolio towards highpoly sculpts instead of ingame meshes before i apply though? Or do you think they would be open to anything?
Knald isn't a baking program. It uses your normal map to create a height map, and then uses that geometry to bake from. Here is a quick demo I did to show what I mean. note, the nDo AO was a combination of of the highpoly AO and the details.
Serp: here is a tutorial: A. select your highpoly element(s) B. key them at frame 0 C. key them at frame 10 D. move them at frame 10 E. Repeat for low F. Repeat for the rest of the elements. =D
I've had something similar happen to me before I switched to marmo for my bakes. The only thing that helped was to hide all the highpoly actors in the 'reference geo' list and unhide them again. Hopefully, a third exposed boolean compound object :)
Besides its lack of support for D3D hardware shaders, I'm loving Nitrous. It took a 1.2mil highpoly hardsurface model I was working on and absolutely manhandled it like a boss. D3D display driver just about swallowed its tongue trying to cope with that.