Thanks.
Texturing, Painting those Textures; creating Maps; UV Set Management... all this is always a struggle for me. I am working twice the time getting this part done than the modelling process itself always needs. It's sometimes a really tedious and still too much of a techie work - but I love it
Let me show off some more:
Here is the basemesh of the alienhead I showed before (with maps):
(Because this model were never meant to be animated, the topology around the neck has no proper structure for this animation purpose. It just should provide enough resolution for higher polycounts (getting the details in). But in the end I could not resist making an animation out of it. You can clearly see the wrong bending of the neck in the resulting animation. There is a better one with better quality; though not uploaded, but the one showed already is good enough to see the overall problem of that model).
(The Maps used for this model. The Subdermal map is used for Subsurface Scattering purposes... scattering around the subdermal flesh, fat, bone and muscle colors in conjunction with a very dull skincolor above it).
(The 16 bit TIFF Displacement Map... just for higher polycount-Renderings to keep the overall structure in a good shape (the normal map cannot serve this task))
(This is the resulting 3ds max rendering... as you can see: Colors are dull; effects are low and the overall appearance is not really satisfying; though he looks a bit more like an Alien in this image).
http://www.tnovelist-ent.com/Images/alien_ambassador_01.jpg(A prerender with all of the details within ZBrush... good for checking if all details have been transfered to 3ds max properly enough - this Model has around 2 Million quadrilateral polygons. I am just providing a link because the image is quiete big)
(That's a series of the final composite character with all effects onto it... including Depth of Field, Motion Blur; Specular Bloom and some other fancy visual but very subtle effects like various colorgradings during animation to fake a more lifelike skin, a.s.o. I also added an Eye-blink to the animation, which is not visible within the youtube animation.)
It took me about a day to construct, paint, animate, render and composite all this (about 14 hours of work). It has no special purpose, except that this is an "alien/human hybrid" which relys to a story I wrote some time ago. Nothing special... just sci/fi
Here is a 10 minute video of how I model low poly characters (just a protoss leg, but it shows my workflow of doing LowP Stuff - adopted this from Ben Mathis - the master of LowP Modeling):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm4E5QG9ZDMI hope you guys find this information useful
Greetz
Tristan