I'm interested in having characters that can customise their character, adding armour to a standard model. adding armour on top of the model, diffuse map over the normal map? how one could do it in the old engines one can buy or steal armour and place the armour on target areas of the character- arms and shoulders, body…
It really depends on the individual's workflow. The way I (and a lot of other people I think) would do it is: Make high poly model first. Make low poly model around the shape of high-poly. Then you can render down whatever maps you want from the high poly to the low poly, usually it's just a normal map but technically you…
Here's some good info from Pior on texturing normal-mapped assets: http://www.pioroberson.com/tuts/tut_texturing_tricks.htm You could also check out the AquaBoy images on his site there, excellent use of normal, specular and diffuse maps, you can see how they were set up.