Since you mentioned zbrush, then no, UVs are not necessary on the highpoly sculpt for baking normal or diffuse maps. They'd only be needed if you were baking inside of zbrush (since it requires the highpoly and lowpoly mesh to be the same tool).
looks really good. I have a question though, when making hard surface stuff like this, do you usually create the lowpoly first and then sub-D model a highpoly from that? or is it still highpoly > lowpoly?
So I tweaked the model i made for my heartseeker rakan to match the star guardian theme. I skipped the highpoly, there's no time for me to do a detailed highpoly sculpt, I will try to add details in texture.
Are you going to do a highpoly for it? Some of thous details you got your ref picture is kinda hard to create with a texture. If you are doing a highpoly you absolutely could get it down pretty far in the count.
retoped and ready to unwrap, duplicated meshes and reduced their polycount to save a bit of time, and ensure the lowpoly is sticking to the Highpolys sillouette (purple coloured material also helping here by identifying where the highpoly parts are poking through)
Try the same with intersecting highpoly and merged lowpoly. We can get into the aesthetics of merging highpoly meshes, or moreso limiting nasty intersections, but there isn't any technical reason why your high would need to be merged.
Thanks for the feedback! The profile view looks a bit better now. Yes the plan is to do a highpoly and bake it down. Just wanted to make sure the basic shape/scale/proportions were good before starting the highpoly work.
i really like the proportions of this model, but the highpoly is really weird, like ou tried a weird mix between cartoony and somewhat realistic, right now it isnt working much id say work a tad more in the highpoly.
Yeah, Highpoly first then low after. I normally use a combination of removing loops from the highpoly cage meshes, and modelling from scratch - depending on which I think will be faster/more appropriate for that particular part of the mesh.