Character Brief: The Captain - Retopology, Unwrapping and Baking

First, I tried retopping the entire head of the character altogether, including all the pieces of the helmet, but ended up retopping the front piece and the one going around the back of the head separately, since the incide was difficult to retop because of spaces I left between the pieces and the head, which is something I will keep in mind for the future. I could have probably managed to retop them, but it would have taken way more time than I could afford and so, I needed to make a decision. So I ended up retopping them separetely. 

I kept the deformation loops on the face as even as possible and used the cut tool in order to retop it altogether with the eyepatch, to avoid any holes in the mesh in the scenario the mesh would be animated. 

I first retopped everything, then used the Conform and Conform Relax tools in order to clean and even out everything.

For the bullets, the wires, gauntlets and the small bits of the shoe I used Zremesher and then Conformed them to the high poly. 

For the leg, I prefer doing most of it manually, as it is a point of interest and I wanted it to be perfect. Plus, since there are so many small pieces, painting over baking errors would waste too much time.

For the shoe, I retopped the big part of it myself (the shoe itself) and used the Zremesher method for the laces and circle bits in order to save some time.

I've seen plenty of stylized characters with no deformation loops in the hands, but I decided it was a safer bet using them and I wanted to practice retopping them properly, so I added them in the end. 

I then unwrapped the mesh on four UV sheets: one for the clothes, the shoe and the glove, one for the leather and metal bits and one for the head, as well as one for the eyeball. I straightened the UVs as much as possible without warping the textures. 

After baking, I only got errors on the small bits and pieces like the bullets and the shoelaces, which I painted over in Photoshop, after finishing the texturing process, in case I had to bake some of the maps again. 

I also had to go back and model a bandage around the leg in Zbrush, since the shape of the organic leg going into the mechanical one looked a bit unnatural and I had to do something to fix it. It took a bit longer, but I just conformed the mesh to the new high poly and had no further issues.