@bkost Thanks for the wakeup call, I really needed to add more breakup cards as well vary their lengths and widths. My references are these: And this is currently my diffuse downsampled:
Maybe its diffuse from the cubemap reflections? The clouds looks like ray marched volume textures. Like this: http://shaderbits.com/blog/creating-volumetric-ray-marcher
For the Hattery, I treat the masks the same as the diffuse and normal maps. I assume they have gamma premultiplied into them. Otherwise the colors appear too bright/vibrant/saturated.
Put your opacity map into the alpha channel of your diffuse ...in toolbag mess with the alpha threshhold properties...never used xoliul's shader but I imagine it is probably the same
I am really impressed by the fan, the normal map bake came out really well combined with the diffuse making it truly look like it's still there, that sir is awesome.
Can you export your polypaint colors onto the zbrush auto uv tiles thing? Then apply that map to the highpoly in max and bake a diffuse map in addition to the normals.