Just to see if im understanding you correctly, what you would want to do is to have a tool to select the hard edges and bevel them before transferring to another package?
hnnnnggggggg! It looks great- I'm sure the authentic battle damage will really take it over the top. I don't envy you when it comes time to transfer this all down;)
http://we.tl/vNKwVs1jZO Link to .max file, should you still be interested in helping me out... Didn't fix the asset tracking, no point in transferring a broken normal map...
You can bake textures from a high poly model to a lower one pretty easily. http://www.creativebloq.com/quickly-transfer-textures-new-uv-layout-maya-7134086
Hey Paul, long time no see. :) How are you planning on transferring it to 3D? Keeping it cartoony, or more photo-realistic? (Might be a bit too gore in that case I think.)
the maya-concept certainly makes more sense. anyway, if you want to transfer tweaked normals between those apps, you're in for some fun, best to break the mesh up. :)
Iron Bear, I don't think I understand, are you saying to get a plane with the scales already displaced (through a painted displacement map) and then that somehow transfers to the highpoly model?
Never mind, I found out how to do it in maya. There was an attribute that didn't show in the optionbox but could be changed in the attribute editor after I applied the "transfer attribute" command.
You could just work on one side and then transfer the sculpt information over when you are done? I think Undoz might be right about the model not being symmetrical.