Great work everybody, everyone is really making leaps and bounds in their environments. I'm finding this pretty tough going, really rusty on certain stuff but it's all coming back quickly. Blockout is finished, working on some high poly stuff :)
I figure the process would be to quickly rough sculpt, retopo the separate pieces, recompile the high res, and basically bake out a cavity map. Unless this seems unnecessary? Definitely would tackle one of the first questions I had.
did you guys see this http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?162584-Carver-s-Sketchbook-%28tutorial-added-Pg-4%29&p=1030280&viewfull=1#post1030280 pretty clean way to quickly get your guides in place
CrazyBump is better and quicker. What Scott does here with multiple layers and a bunch of different Nvidia filter settings, can be done much more quickly and with instant graphic feedback in CrazyBump. More here. http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#P
Age of Empires Online? It's free-to-play and you can coop on that, if you don't mind an RTS. It's quite slow to start with, but once you're out of the tutorials hit level 5 or so (pretty quick), it builds up quite quickly.
Mostly because maya has a lot of awesome tools and scripts that allow them to hammer out a lot of episodes quickly, I've seen 2d animations make in 3d programs that user bones and weighting as well, there's a lot of advantages too it.
Most definitely. My approach was to carve out things quickly so I can get the shapes right, and then worry about edge flow. Hopefully I haven't painted myself in a corner since that facial topology is pretty gross.
Do I smell a cheap 3d scanner?! :P Would be nice to scan in an object and use it as a guide when starting a model. You could quickly mash something out of playdough, scan it, bring it into max and model over it. :D
biofrost, well that's the idea, this isn't Hammer it seems, it's some kind of simplified editor to quickly prototype ideas. Looking forward to seeing how well this does, I wouldn't mind some more coop Portal 2 levels to play!
For plank variation play with the Lumicance variation values. You can easily use levels to crunch values if you want black and white masks. You can use blends and all sorts of tricks to make different masks quickly.