Hidatsa Character - Low Poly & UV

I spent most of the second week working on the low poly. Before starting, I rescaled everything in Zbrush, decimated my subtools and exported them. As before, I made the low poly for some models directly in Zbrush with Zremesh and adjusted them with Zmodeler, this is how I made the belts and bracelets. For the quiver, I already had the low poly I imported from 3ds Max so I only had to adjust it a little. All the other parts of the model I retoped in Maya. Another one of my main goals for this project was to learn how to retopo in Maya, instead of 3D Coat which I've been using until now, and I found it quite easy and much more quicker than 3D Coat because of some additional tools it had.

The way that I built the the topology was by keeping it very low at the start to get the flow of the loops right and keep them clean, then slowly added more loops to smooth it out. When I made it I was mainly thinking about how it would deform and if it would maintain the silhouette and main shapes of my sculpt, but overall the topology is quite similar to the ones of my previous characters, as I was quite happy with how those were looking and bending (especially the hands). 

Retoping the character was quite straight-forward and I didn't have many troubles with it, the only thing which was a bit more challenging were the braids. In their case, I made a cylinder in 3ds max which I aligned on top of them with splines and tried having it follow the shape of the braid as much as possible; then I attached the cylinders to the hair cap which was retoped in Maya. I made them like this because I didn't want to go over budget (which would have been the case if I had 3 separate cylinders for one braid, like the way I built them), even though with one cylinder wouldn't perfectly keep the silhouette. This isn't that much of a problem because I am planning to add hair cards on top of them to add some variation and hide the cylinders. 

Also, I decided to give up on the beaded bracelet on her right hand because I wanted to keep each bead as a separate object, and in total I think that the bracelet was taking to much budget for being such a small object ( it had around 1.5k tris).  I remade the necklace as well to reduce the number of tris it had at the start because it was too much (around 3k tris) and managed to get it down to 1.3k tris which is still not great but acceptable. 

In total, together with the props, the character has around 19.4k tris, which would leave me with 5.5k tris to add hair cards and duplicate some feathers and arrows.

For the Unwrap, I split the character on two texture sheets, and I will add another separate one for the eyes, because I want to try and make a realistic material for them, and another sheet for the hair cards. I am still not sure how to split the budget between them but I will figure it out. 

I'm still not happy with the way I packed the UV islands because I couldn't find a way to have no empty spaces left, I tried out different layouts and in the end went with the best of those. I gave more space to the all the parts which would be skin, also made some small accessories a bit bigger so I could have some detail on them as well, like the beads, earrings and bird necklace.

Making the low poly and UVs took me most of the second week, the next thing that I want to get done as quickly as possible is the bake and then start the textures.