Well I gave hims bodies poly flow, more of a flow and less of a grid. I also reduced his coat to three buttons instead of 6 and also made his clothes look a little more loose. Missed the point about the shoes, I'll fix that later. Flats: (I also threw in a normal map of one of the bodys to just take a space and give you an…
Neat. So the process as described would also work with renders out of ZBrush, where you would paint flat colors for the ID's and render using the Flat material? That about right?
Your partially right somedoggy, I've converted it but then painted over with the flat color the areas that were supposed to be flat. BobtheGreatll, thats a good thought i might remake it with a better specular.
@FreneticPonies It does not yet have an albedo. I wanted to focus on the height and normals first. It indeed looks really flat at some places, not sure if that's the flat color or the normal map itself.
The flat texture, assuming you paint on the flats in Photoshop or a painting program rather than mudbox or similar? Just to get an idea of what you're working with in terms of resolution and unwrap really.
There's a way: Object space normal All usual caveats apply, but it should work in this case since you're applying something baked on a flat plane onto other perfectly flat planes.
Probably you are using the flat color material, or you are in the flat render mode. Change material from the material icon on the left, and/or go to the menu bar, "render", and activate the "preview" button.
Flats! The next step for me is separating the different parts of the paintinginto different layers. I tend to do that with flat colors. These colors are more like place holders instead of final color.
Just bake it to your texture flat? You could generate it in a flat manner like you had for your original texture, then bake it into position, no? That way nothing changes but the texture content.
I'd model and bake the grating part completely flat then just apply the normals to a round low poly. You could also just model the whole thing flat then bend it into a cylinder.