Futzing with the Z. Not sure how this will work in a normal map, but I’ll give the good ol college try!

Futzing with the Z. Not sure how this will work in a normal map, but I’ll give the good ol college try!

yeah, this is looking a lot better now!theres something wrong with the ellbow, it looks like its beding in the wrong direction…?
That UV layout is really weak IMO. YOu are not using your (0,1) space efficently at all, and with only 512 X512 you need to make every pixel count. You can definatly cram in those UVs tighter.
One strategy of packing UVs is to cram them in the lower right or left hand side as tightly as possible and then scale them up to fit everywhere. Or just move them around like puzzle pieces until you get the best fit possible.
So, yeah. It is looking really good, and I wouldn’t want the texture resolution to stop you, because it is looking nice.
Now that they’re all layed out, I think packing them in will be a lot easier. I’ll mess with them a bit more and try to figure out this normal stuff as well.
Me either. I’m having some real problems with the ZBrush normal maps. Maybe I’ll post what the freaky deaky thing looks like.
Normal map rendered with final gather just cause I’m too lazy to place real lights. Not terribly detailed, but I guess with a 512 x 512 map you can only do so much. Or maybe I’m just not doing this right.

And started blocking in some color treatment with Projection Master in ZBrush. When I’m done with the map I’ll probably clean it up in Photoshop. It’s a start, I guess. I need more contrast and some more color. Right now it looks like a burned rotted shank of meat. Blech!

TO BOXY DUDE!
jamihn you got 1000 tries to use, why are you only using 500? sorry if I missed something. Use all 1000 tries this peace can look way better with some tweaking.
As I said before the High poly looks great.
maybe? add more detail to it aswell ( ruff warty skin? ) just a suggestion
Yeah, I thought I could get away with trying to build really efficient geometry, but it’s not doing what I want it to do. I think I’m asking too much of my normal map so I think I’ll use those extra polys. We’ll see what happens here.
I agree, to go from that crazy nice mesh at the top of page to that is kinda disheartening, go ahead and use the polys budgeted to you…no need to be “extra efficient” imho…I know I am prolly gonna use up all 1000 tris for my model…
-KDX-
Clocks in at 688 now. I added a bunch of polys to smooth out the vines and actually add some chunk to the arm. Also changed the knuckles. And surprisingly, I didn’t have to adjust the UVs all that much.

yeah man use all your tries, it’s already looking much better… also make those vines things thinner

Hey bud, looking much better with more polys now. Looking forward to see how it will come out in the end. 
Thanks for the comments and suggestions. It’s coming down to the wire so I best get to texturing. I got tired of mucking around with normal mapping. I think it’s going to take me a bit more time to get the hang of it so I grabbed a displacement map out of ZBrush and used that as the base for my bump map. I’ve applied it to a brownish blinn to see how the bumps are working. Not too bad. It’s starting to get really creepy. On to colors and spec!

whatever you do, be aware that your normal map in Maya will NOT look like the normal map inZBrush, especially with a resolution of 512x512…