I took a while this weekend to revisit some low poly body parts. I recorded a bunch of this modelling and then watched it back, it helped me figure out where I was making some topology errors.
I never build hands these days, I’ve got a bunch of hand models with different polygon counts and I just pull one into whatever model I’ve working on. I was happy with this hand:
Untitled from Rick Stirling on Vimeo.
Eric Chadwick was posted a guide on his site detailing what would be expected of Technical Artists at Blue Fang. It’s a great read.
I saw this book recommended on an art forum, so picked it up the other day. It’s a cross between a Zbrush manual and a series of tutorials.
I have to recommend it, it’s kinda like the missing printed manual but it embeds the functionality of the tools in lots of real work examples.
I defer writing content yet again, and instead send you Owen Shepherds site to look at his post, TUTORIAL – creating perfectly tiling meshes in Zbrush for use in videogame environments.
This tutorial walks you through a workflow that I have developed that allows you to create perfectly tiled normal maps on perfectly tiled lowpoly geometry, especially useful for cliff faces and rough stone surfaces.
I’ve just stumbled across this lovely modelling tutorial where Ben Clark takes a sketch and builds a base model, sculpts it, builds new topology, UVs, bakes, textures and Rigs it.
Eric Chadwick has been working very hard on the Polycount Wiki, and has just released a massive amount of information about Normal Mapping that pretty much covers all the tech you need to know.