Handpainted Barbarian
After what feels like far too long, I've now wrapped this barbarian project I've been tinkering with for the last few months on and off.
Despite initially slow progress, discovering a new handpainted texture workflow in Substance Painter and a new piece of rigging software has shortened things down immensely, potentially upwards of 2-3 *weeks* of real hands on time and I'm super happy with the results.
As I'm now comfortable building textures tactically and procedurally in Substance with only some minor Photoshop cleanup, I was able to get the bulk of the colouring done in only 2 days, down from my usual estimate of a week.
AccuRIG was also crucial in getting the character rigged and posed in good time, with minimal fixes and reskinning needed after the initial pass (namely around the hands). Being familiar with Max's skinning tools already certainly helps, but as a tool to add to my arsenal for free, you can't really go wrong with it.
Inital highpoly sits at 5.36 million quads and was baked down to an animatable 13,915k quads, well within my budget of 15k I'd set prior to starting.
Pre - Rig. For this project the new software package AccuRIG was a huge stepup for rigging timesavings. Taking the total time spent down from days to less than an hour.
High poly - full profile. A new technique I found for creating thick hairstrands was *essential* for generating good looking stylised fur that could be controlled in the retopology step easily.
High poly - Closeup. The final step of creating the body was the careful use of a mass applied surface polish mod. This gave a ton of definition and sharpness to the face with no effort.
Body texture - For material setup only Diffuse and Normal are needed, with the former being plugged into the emissive slot at .5 to lean into that handpainted style even more.
"Clothing" texture - holding all elements which aren't skin and bone.