Legendary Jacket Item - Retop, Unwrap and Bake

While retopping the jacket, I did my best to create proper deformation loops for the shoulder and elbow area that would enable it to deform without breaking the shape. I did my best to keep the topology as even as possible. For details such as the chest piece and medals I used triangles in order to reduce topology. I believe that won't cause any problem with deformation in a game, as the chest piece is made of metal and wouldn't need to deform. It would be simply skinned to one single bone. 

At first. I simply concentrated on getting the topology done, the cleaned it afterwards, straightening up the lines and inserting loops where the topolgy was too simple and uneven. 

Looking back, the trim around the chest piece could have gone with less topology, but I was still far from the budget limit of 16000 tris with a final tri count of  13,512   for the military jacket. 

I then unwrapped it, trying to keep the seams to a minimum and as hidden as possible. I straightened out the pieces as much as I could without causing distorsions in the unwrap, in order to better pack them together. I split the jacket into two UV sheets using material ID's: one for the jacket and one for the metal pieces and details. 

For the biker jacket skin, I simply took the military jacket, took out the medals and modified the trim around the chest piece, as well as retopped the shoulder pads and the spikes. This way, I didn't have to redo the unwrap for meshes that are esentially almost the same. I then unwrapped the new details and added them on the UV sheet in the place of ones I took out. 

The biker jacket ended up with a final tri count of 11,982.

I then prepared the jacket for baking by doing a last check for any kind of errors, checking the naming of the high and low polys and vertex painting the high polys in order to be able to generate colour IDs in Substance Painter. 

I took the jacket into Substance Painter and baked it. The bake came out quite well, with just a couple of errors that I had to paint over manually in Photoshop. Overall I was really satisfied with how the bake came out. 

Now the jackets are ready to be textured and finalised.