Well, to be honest, the model isn't entirely mine. This guy sent me a model with 33k faces. My job is to reduce that down to a usable number for a crowd scene. I've gotten down to under 1k faces. Could probably shave another 50 faces off.
I used Multi-Res to initially reduce the faces. Multi-Res left quite a mess. His face, shoulder, and feet got totally mangled. In the time it took me to clean it up, I could have modeled him from scratch. Well, cleaning somebody elses messy mesh is still a good thing to practice.
Fix the mesh, rig it, find bad geometry. Delete the rig, fix the geometry, rig again, find more bad geometry, et cetera. It's a vicious cycle.
A lot of the subtle details come from the textures. I started out by painting his muscles in black and white. Then I used that as a template for the bump and spec level maps. Looking pretty good around the shoulder and clavicle, which are the areas that I concentrated on.
When it's what you do, it's what you do. Might look hard to one person, but it's not to another. I call this "Catching Arrows". My woman can cook up a storm while I have a hard time with macaroni & cheese. Know what I mean?
Thanks for the comments, folks.
play.fiddle.learn
