Hey nihilcon, you’ve got some cool sketches here, I particularly dig the silohette. I did a quick paintover of your model, because you may want to change a few things with the topolgy, in order for things to run smoothly inside of zbrush. Keep it up, looking forward to updates 
Many thanks zberry. I really appreciate you taking time to do that. I’m never sure if I should use triangles or not so that’s cleared that up and I’ll go and sort that stuff now. I’m trying to get the base mesh finished today and then to move in ZBrush for a sculpt so we’ll see how it all goes from there.
I don’t have any real experience bringing meshes into a game engine yet, but I think it’s fine to use triangles, because everything will be triangulated anyway. I’m not sure of the implications of tri’s for rigging, but since the contest only requires a still, you can get away with them, and save alot of poly-budget. But they will cause a mess in z-brush, so you may want to save a copy of your mesh as is, for use as the final low-rez, but then make another mesh that is all quads, as evenly spaced as possible, to import in zbrush. Zbrush will accept tri’s, but you will run into artifacts and nastiness once you divide it up all the way.
Base mesh has progressed a bit (but not fast enough).
I’ve been spending precious time experimenting with generating normal maps but had very little success no matter what settings I use. The maps seem to have either nothing on them or to have lots of lines from the low poly mesh, maybe someone can advise me on the best way to do this. I’ve read almost every tutorial on the subject now and my head is mince.
So far I’ve tried taking smaller sections of the model into ZBrush for sculpting e.g. the faceplate (see below), I thought this might work better than taking the entire mesh across especially at this experimental stage (does anyone think there is any merit in this method?).
I’ve been exporting a high-res mesh back to Maya from which I’ve tried to generate the normals but success eludes me at the moment. My enthusiasm is undented however and I’m banging on anyway in the hope that I’ll work it out somehow.
Still working on base mesh . . . hopefully start sculpting/texturing today. I know its not a winner but any crits would be appreciated as this is the first time I’ve built a full figure and I’m doing this to learn
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