That's great spitty, good job on the hair! Minor nitpick but I think a hard edge would work better for the border of the bust? It looks like the shoulder area has been squashed down vertically because of the soft, curving border.
Yeah, it is a tileable hi-poly that will be baked down to a texture. I then used noisemaker, but since it tends to explode polys when you apply it, I then use the MaskByNoise function and a mix of claytubes and the trim smooth border brush.
it's a lot of testing right now, what gives the best results. so far linear uv borders with interpolated inner uvs work pretty solid, not totally perfect as max doesn#t keep the borders totally linear i think - but padding fixes most of this a much more complex mesh, again normalmaps created solely from the lowpoly, no…