I dun learned me some stuff

Today I watched the Gnomon tutorial, Character Modeling for Next-Gen Games, in preparation for this project, which ultimately had some good advice as well as an interesting workflow method. What the artist did, was quickly block out a human structure in Maya (looked like a block man) then went immediately into sculpting the general anatomy of the character in Zbrush. Once he had completed the anatomical reference, he brought in subtool after subtool making up the clothing for the character, most of witch were also block structured, and then detail sculpted each part to a finished high-poly state. He completed an entire high-res mesh in this way then exported the medium subdivision levels out to Maya. There he used a plugin called Nex, which was much like the re-topologize tools in Zbrush, allowing him to draw vertices directly on the high-res mesh to create the low-poly game model. The nice thing about Nex was that he was able to switch between using maya's tools as well as the plugin's own, which gave him more versatility. He then layed out the UV's and then using the freeware Xnormal, baked the normals of the ultra high-res .obj's (ones that maya couldn't even open) to create the normal map based on the UV's for the low poly mesh. Xnormal was also capable of doing the occlusion bake as well, and the results were pretty impressive. Not a bad tutorial to watch. Unfortunately it skipped over the vast majority of the technical nitty-gritty, which is pretty much the sole reason I want to watch tutorials like that. Oh well, you might want to check it out if your planning to work on next gen character.

Heres some links:

Tutorial

xNormal

Nex Plugin for Maya