Polycount and character mesh opinions.

[nabiul]

Well there's not much to skinning when you have a character with two pieces of mesh, a body and a head. I gave him some basic weight painting so that the pads wouldn't clip through him etc. I wasn't sure if I would be able to import working animations with blender so I had to try it first before going any further with him.

[Graylord]

Are we talking about the same thing? In vertex mode all you do is hit X and 'delete edge loop'. Unless theres a triangle in the loop there's nothing else to do. You can also edge slide whole loops to rebalance the topology, then delete the supporting ones.

Sorry, my lack of sleep caused me to think it was Max.

[nabiul]

How do you guys do your high poly models? Sculpting is turning out to be fairly terrible at this.

[nabiul]

I'm getting some errors in xNormal when making the normal maps, any one know what could be causing this?

EDIT: Nvm, I just used blenders internal baker, I can never get xnormal to work right.

[nabiul]

Tada! 9 days from start to finish, too long and some lessons learned along the way.

I really don't like UDK texture compression or the material system; you get a lot of control but it's alot of work to get good results. I need to get a shiny reflective coating like appearance on his visor and find someway to stop the specular maps being distorted by compression.

I want to keep working on him but I can't afford to waste anymore time on one asset, onto doing the animset... all 50 something animations.

[JessieG]

Tada! 9 days from start to finish, too long and some lessons learned along the way.

I really don't like UDK texture compression or the material system; you get a lot of control but it's alot of work to get good results. I need to get a shiny reflective coating like appearance on his visor and find someway to stop the specular maps being distorted by compression.

I want to keep working on him but I can't afford to waste anymore time on one asset, onto doing the animset... all 50 something animations.

For reflective surfaces, you should probably create a mask texture to focus a reflection onto just those specific parts. The specular tends to always look like that when you have large spaces of a solid color. Breaking up the spec with some dirt/noise patterns and using a bit of color will help it pop a lot more.