Here is some Art done by myself and the Art staff at America's Army for our version 2.7 release (http://www.americasarmy.com) To thoes that dont know of the game is a free online FPS made w/ the Unreal 2.5 engine. I hope you enjoy, more images are to come!
I'd highly recommend these two for you, the info is a bit dated but will help you get a pretty nice base going and understanding of the lower poly figure before going to full zbrush.. http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/product/215/Body-Modeling-for-Games…
Most desktops use 3.5" bays, but some actually have the smaller 2.5", these are uncommon and it is unlikely that you have one, so unless you want to tape it to the inside of your case you need a converter, brand name doesn't matter they are all the same just a chunk of metal. Quick format will work fine.
I've commonly hit 2.5-3 gig of memory used when batchrendering large scenes with Maya on a 64bit system with 4 gig of memory, and if I run orthos on the system, it will max out at 4 gig of memory used, so it is possible. Probably not as beneficial as using 64bit with 8 gigs, but still do-able.
Nice keep it up! I am also struggling with anatomy even moreso before i got my hands on these videos by Riven Phoenix. All are on youtube, like 230 something episodes... Try it out maybe youl like it or you wont. :P [ame] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFxHEZP_70c[/ame]
yeah learning a lot more, wishing i kinda learned these things when i was doing the polycount adventure contest hehe, a test bake and render of wireframe in maya, need to reduce the 23k polycount feels a bit too much for the character
I'd try checking the normals on the low poly and resetting them. Also exporting and importing as obj may work. Also do you have Max 2.5 Star and supersampling enabled? Just curious if you're using Mental ray or scanline.
I wrote this small guide on how to bake clean maps using 3DS Max and XNormal with Handplane plugin. Pretty straightforward and easy to understand. Might be trivial for the seasoned artist. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2094877&postcount=205
yeah some heroes have very fucked up value range.....for esample Lina's spec exponent (alpha mask 2) goes from low to high in a range of value from 0-50... 50 to 255 is is just extreme and weird
Way too much money for that rig, that case, processor, and 2 graphics cards really jack up the price. You could build an i7 920 rig (overclock it to 4.0ghz), with a Geforce GTX 275, 9 gigs of ram, for around 1.3k