so i've been rigging asnd skinning the character as a test before unwrapping, putting him into a pose idea i had for the final in game render. but the shoulders are not deforming well at all. i looked at the polycount wiki and tried to match it as best i could on the mesh but they jsut aren't going right, or perhaps i'm messed up the skinning . i think i've alreayd solved the  elbows (which if i'm right was something i thought i already did but didn't, at least or the normal arm anyway). but yeah  pics below.

So I finally retopped him, it took me longer than i would have liked it too, i got confused around certain part like the hookshot arm. i wanted the tri count to match next gen tri counts, ultimately i'm still not sure what i good tri count is for a character. after reading edge magazine issue 267, it said  sunset overdrive's characters were about 40,000 tri's each.
 after doing more research killzones character were around the same too as stated here :
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-inside-killzone-shadow-fall
then trying to find out other game characters i found that ryse's character/s were 85,000:
http://gearnuke.com/ryse-downgrade-officially-confirmed-crytek-ceo/
and the main characters in Infamous Second Son were 120,000:(check page 71)
http://suckerpunch.playstation.com/images/stories/GDC14_infamous_second_son_engine_postmortem.pdf

I'm not sure how much of an improvement these tri counts make to the character, outside of the meshes having smoother normals which hug closer to the sculpt and smoother cloth, hair and body animations.

anyways here's a breakdown of the mesh as it stands 

still gotta sort out the hair clipping through the snood/jacket , I'm wondering if there's a physics trick to make the hair stand down whilst it's there and pings out as he runs around and jumps and stuff, or whether I'll just have to redo the hair to some extent . 

onto the next step for now

edit also closeup of head

 SO been a couple of weeks since last update. no real excuses for it so I'll just jump right in

 right now i essentially have the whole sculpt there now, think i need to tweak 1 or 2 things but it's all there now. above is a shot of every subtool together but i slowly break down the whole thing.

 here is a shot of the jacket on it's own. as with the cyber arm with the hookshot canon thing it clips through. when it's all retopped the jacket's sleeves will be retractable and so will the guys hookshot arm thing. i like the idea that an animator would be able to roll up the sleeves and lower the arm and hide most of the arm but it's hard to show with the sculpt.

 here he is with just a t shirt

 and here he is with just his trousers. i like the idea that he could just remove his clothing which could be used for game plots or cut-scenes or something, i was kinda looking at delsin from infamous second song and how all the layers of clothing on his torso looked like they acted separate from each other so i had the shirt sculpted to have a similar effect( though the jacket and shirt clipping though each-other is an issue i haven't figured out how to %100 fix as i can see it being hard making them not clip through)

 here's a close up of the head. someone named tobbo on the polycount version of this blog/thread commented on the neck being too long and the hands being too large. i fixed the neck but I've yet to figure out the hands and whether to big or not.

 also got the teeth and tongue  in the model

i actually spent a week- week and a half looking into hair techniques trying to find a technique that would allow me to model the hair quickly and allow me to tweak it on the fly, looking as sculpting and z brush hair/ fibers and a bunch of stuff. the only way i knew of how to do it before was brute forcing it, but it was a long tedious method and takes a long time to see how it's really gonna look, especially with this kind of hair which is lot's of fairly random sharp spiky strands

(the model i made from the old design you can see at the start of this page)

eventually i came across a method in max which consists of drawing sufaces on the head seperate from the model similar to this except i spilt it down the middle for more control
[img]http://www.hairfinder.com/techniques/4sectionparting.gif[/img]

 

then crated a plane and went into hair and fur modifier going into tools and clicking on instance node and using the plane as the instance.

then tweaking the size, number and styling to get the results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-TsteJQGg8
(here's the link to the vid where i eventually learned the technique from)

i did have to enlarge the spikes in order to cut the tri count to as low as possible( think it's 8,532 or something currently.

 

think i still need to model the actually hook and wire, which shouldn't take me very long at all

suppose i should start retopping, rigging then texture him soon. maybe start concepting a new character