This is not a step by step tutorial. I will summarize the workflow I used for one of my characters with lots of images and some print-screens directly from the applications used (maya/mudbox/photoshop etc ...), also in the end i will provide some info about tangent space normal maps so you could think of this tutorial as mainly normal mapping related stuff.
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1.0 Introduction :
This character was my entry for the Dominance War II competition ( www.dominancewar.com ). The main theme of the competition was to design a low poly game character, but there were some rules (limitations) about the specs we could use for geometry and textures (main character will not exceed 6000 triangles, 1000 more triangles for weapons/gear and we could use a pet also but the budget will come from main character; for textures we could use 1x2048 square for main character + pet, if any , and another 1x1024 square for weapons/detachable gear; diffuse, specular, normal,bump,opacity ,glow,reflection maps were allowed).
This tutorial is intended for game (low poly) characters and assumes that you have a basic knowledge of normal mapping and its uses; you can search on google if you need more info about this subject ( a good start will be this page on zbrush.info ) .
I will start by showing you the final files sent to the competition to give you an idea about the direction this tutorial is going.
