2016 is the one that got worse with Service Packs, memory leaks, and instability. There are a couple of Unwrap UVW bugs in 2017, but it's pretty stable overall. The unwrap bugs are 1. Select Overlapping Polygons is not working. 2. Peel Mode moves unselected UV elements.
really great stuff. My only crit is that there are places that are showing polygons that haven't been sufficiently smoothed/rounded. Like maybe it needs one more level of turbosmooth edit: woops, didn't see the second page and the comment right above mine.
you should work much more on the silhouette of your char... if you apply a surface shader to your model and turn it around in the viewport you wont see all those polygons... i could create the same silhouette with a 10th of your polycount...
make 1st UV for the diffuse etc. maps (overlap and mirror as much as you like), 2nd UV for the baked shadows (every polygon gets its own space in the UV). Bake shadows to UV2. http://www.3dtutorialzone.com/tutorial?id=48
Looks good...will look great once you add the wear and tear. Lighting looks great so far. Some of the wall corners look too sharp and polygonal...I would add some small subtle bevels to smooth those out.
zbrush actually has tools to model vert by vert and delete faces. The main thing is that it is used to dealing with a massive level of polygons. It doesn't need to clean itself up and optimize the topology, it can apply sheer brute force to hammer out a shape.
Is the top supposed to look like it's made of stone? I feel your material definition is really lacking. Also, why didn't you back any details from a high poly? You've also spent way too many polygons on the character.
If you look closely at any of the screenshots, you'll see a lot of the structures have numbers or lettering on them such as "PMB 32" or "<<<keep area clear>>>". Each letter, number, and sign is mapped to a polygon. This allows you to spell anything and arrange it in anyway that works.
I miss some days, but I'm back. Don't have time to work on the models above, but I will finish it. Now I start a sci-fi scene, with a holographic table. I tried to made it with the least of polygons for create a web-VR demo.
PolyHertz , after the weekend I wil try to make Loop for verts and polygons. Then I will try to add EditPopy support. :) (#4) airbrush, I have 32bi WinXP, and Max2009, so I can't test the script in 64bit OS and MAX. :) Sorry. :)