Low Res Mesh

Theres been a bit of a break since I last worked on this character, what with the game assessment and then a week or so between then and now when I didnt do much other than play Brink (I think everyone once in a while I can just about justify playing a game) and the time spent prepping myself for the hand in for Pre Prep for L6 Study on tuesday, hes fallen a bit to the wayside. But its high time it was finished so I can learn from the mistakes made, start the next project and improve. So to get the ball rolling I decided to stop working on the high res for now. As its in that perpetual state of tweakin where you can accidently spend hours not doing very much on it (which is highly counter productive). So to counter this I started making the low res mesh as all the base forms of the high res will remain the same its only little details and textures I am working on right now. This is my low res at roughly 4700 tris, so just under half the total budget for the character and its looking pretty nice. It does need a lot of clean up and some sorting out of topology but I like to make sure the topology is folling the forms of the high res nicely and then work out how to make that clean and orderly. This way I find the the normal map comes through that bit better. A key thing is prioritising where needs more polygons. For instance the low res boot mesh (not yet built) will be very low as there isnt loads of detail in that area on the high res mesh and its not going to be the centre of attention. The torso and chest piece contain a lot of detail and this should be reflected by both a larger proportion of the poly budget and also more uv space. Although it is worth mentioning you want the distribution of polys over the model to look uniform not really dense in some areas and very sparse in others. It's a fine balance to make work.