Animal Project: Retopology, Unwrapping and Baking

The retopping and unwrapping went smooth overall, but for some little setbacks. When making the deformation loops for the face I failed to actually make them loop around the eyes and mouth, so I had to redo them. Once I got the hang of it though, it went quickly. 

I retopped one part of the fox and mirrored the other half in, but after mirroring it, the loops broke again. I am not sure if it's because of the modifier or something else happened, but I managed to fix and make them loop properly pretty quickly. 

After retopping the saddle too, I was still a lot underbudget, so I added more topology using the Swift Loop tool. I ended up with a final count of  18,572 tris for both the fox and the saddle. I also added material IDs to it so it would make it easier to texture each part individually in painter while still having the whole model baked together. 

I then unwrapped the body and the head onto two different UV sheets. I didn't try to straighten them, since it's an organic shape and it wouldn't have worked, I tried to use the space as best as I could, though there is always space for improvements. Still, I believe I am getting slightly better at using the UV space, even if it isn't perfect. 

For the saddle, I straightened the bits I could without deforming them and it made it easier to fit them on the UV sheet. 

The eyeballs I just cut in half and made the back part smaller as it wouldn't be visible.

I baked the fox in Substance Painter. The bake came out well but for a few errors on the normal and ambient occlusion maps, spcifically on the saddle. I tweaked the model and baked it again. This time, there were less errors and I could paint over them in Photoshop. 

This is the baked model: