@sacboi In his second (EDIT: THIRD) to last comment he said he is aiming for 3rd person view asset quality, not sure if that's changed. Of course what that means in terms of poly count and texture size varies by game. For example, The Last of Us: Part II has fairly high quality player character weapon assets, but I think…
A recurring problem I'm seeing in your low poly is long polys with an adjoining perpendicular faces with normals averaged across the common edge. You need to use some method, which ever you prefer, to correct the shading in those areas (inset face, support loop, face-weighted normal, sharp edges, etc.). Some info on baking…
About renders: semantics. Personally, I would call a screenshot from a real-time renderer, like the one rendering viewport in substance, a render. A real-time renderer is running on the GPU, rendering an image to the pixel area of the viewport. Taking a screenshot, capturing those pixels, is a way of saving a copy of that…
@sacboi Thanks for your comment/critique. I think the proportions probably got out of wack because I rotated it and rescaled it in the beginning since I intended to just render it afterwards, but then made a lot of edits and got the proportions off. I will restudy my reference and fix them. As for some parts being…