I played around with the abdominal to make him a bit skinnier and to make the rib cage stand out a little more. I stored a morph target of the original size then I moved is gut inwards to make him skinny and then played with the morph settings to find a happy medium. Thanks for the feedback :)
Use Transfer Maps for that, and assign your high poly(s) as both source and target, then bake diffuse map. If you're working in dDo, I question you only having a HP, since normal maps are a key factor in the magic, and you can't bake normals from a mesh to itself.
http://www.rsart.co.uk/2006/11/20/how-many-polygons-in-a-piece-of-string/ What engine are you using? Who is your target audience? Wow big is the landscape? Are you using any fancy tech with the terrain like MegaTexture, heightmap based landscapes with continuous Geo-MipMap LOD?
Yeah I am aware of his project. It seems we independently started with a similar concept at about the same time. We discussed collaboration with him quite a while ago, but ended up having slightly diverging goals it seemed. For us 3dsmax will still be the initial target platform though.
nice modeling. I agree your main problems are in design and not execution. I would think about recoil, targeting, and reloading. Right now its not obvious to me how it would work and looks more like a giant sensor of some sort, then a missile turret. Slick modeling though :)
For me, remesh is the zbrush unified skin/remesh/shadowbox auto generation, good enough when rough sculpting and useful to loosen up workflow. retopo is a proper and targeted re-creation of new topology to support either the sculpting you want to do or the animation you want to do. :D
Sorry to here about what you're going through, Lee. Sad fucking Panda indeed, but brighter days are ahead as long as you stay motivated and "stay on target". Talent is all about hard work and if it can't get any worse, you know it will only get better. Hang in there.
My best advice would be to definitely study some anatomy and watch some speed sculpts of characters on youtube. Get the body as close to your target as possible before worrying about clothing or hair or any other details. Building on your fundamentals is key to making good looking artwork.
hmm....Im curious about their target audience. most people that want to create normal maps have a computer and most likely a bunch of programs on it that does a better job then any app out there can ever create. and the people that dont, why would they need a normal map in the first place?
even if you had a visual on the target, it wouldn't even matter since before the jump you can only see what something looked like a few years back in time. I wouldn't get hopes up, the result hasn't yet be repeated and didn't take place in a vacuum.