Mortal Engines: Low Poly Creation & Baking.

Back to Mortal Engines, I wanted to cover the transition progress I made from a high poly digital sculpt to the re modeled low poly version.
Again this process was new to me so I knew it might take some time but at least I would learn a lot from it.
I Took my 45M poly sculpt of the character and "decimated" it to a 4.5 million poly version so I could bring it into 3ds Max without it exploding! lol

Luckily that part worked and I was able to start building the low poly topology over the surface of the high poly mesh. The whole time I needed to be very aware of the density of my topology because If I went over budget ( 9k) then I would be in trouble and need to cut out geometry.
polygon by polygon eventually I finished the whole mesh and I was quite pleased with the overall density of specific zones and the cleanness of it.

Here are some screenshots to show the under 9k model

Front

Side

Back

So my next step was baking the high poly details onto a the low poly model. This is done with a Normal Map, and all i needed to do was create a cage that covered all the high poly details and the low poly geometry, then the rendered did its thing.  What you can see here is a direct comparison of the high poly and the low poly using the normal map It generated. I learned a great deal during this process because it took many repeats to get it as close to perfect as I could

At this final stage, I needed to paint the texture maps for my character and give him some colour details. unfortunately this stage was not fully completed so what you see here is a WIP of the texture.
I used 3D coat to paint directly only the model, sort of like painting a warhammer model.
I really hope to finish this as soon as I have time.

This project was my first proper character project and thanks to all the complex processes involved I learned a great deal and look forward to doing more character art! ;)