Unwrapped and Baked.

He's now unwrapped and baked via Xnormal. Several odd artefacts to clean up and then it's onto texturing. I've considered rigging first but I hear you can't make any adjustments to geometry after to which I'd like to keep that option open for now.

belt

Had a look at redesigning the belt a bit as I was shown these cool motorcross ones. Dunno if I'll keep it as the simplicity of the original maintains consistency.

Head Retop Progress

More retopping.

Another thing

Enjoy my amateur posing.

Retop so far

So far a few things retopped. Tri count is in there just because. Also spent some tris creating the folds to help along the bake I'll put on later. No doubt a lot of tweaking needed especially after rigging due to deformation issues that may arise even though I've consciously made the joints with that in mind.

Retoping and pipeline adjustments.

Began retoping today which required using decimation on the high poly sculpt. Did have a nice base mesh for the clothing however sculpting brought out more than I originally considered so going to do it all by hand.

Previously that would have really irritated me as my plan was to use Z-brushes own Z-remesher to retop. I knew this wasn't a perfect method but it saved several days worth of hours re-topping by hand.  (avoided with a good base mesh, admittedly, though 20/20 foresight is beyond me).  So the trade off was speed for accuracy which seems to be the way with production, having been told 'just get it done'. 

After all that I tried out Zremesher quite heavily with using the curve-lines and masking for density and although it re-meshed really well in some cases there were areas I wasn't really happy with so I've just decided to do it all by hand. It was never my plan to use Z-brush exclusively for this project but merely as an extra tool. 

So with all that said I'm very happy with the results of sculpting I can get from Z-brush yet I like the control and accuracy you can get retoping in 3DSMax with the freeform tools.

Finally, Polypaint. My plan was always to texture via photoshop (with possibly some 3Dcoat for tweaks) and this still remains the case however I wanted to play around and learn as much about Zbrush as I could hence why Thor's head was painted, and even though I really liked that result I found the procedure to get the polypaint baked was a bit of a faff and (probably missed something) and I like the strength of photoshop with regards to brushes, layers and adjustments.

The reason I've mentioned this is because I've been a bit rose-tinted towards Z-brush. It's still an amazing program with fantastic tools of which I intend to master after uni but for now I think I should respect the fact that Max does certain things better; with a little elbow-grease of course.

Tweak

 Got around to tweaking after a quick crit. Wasn't liking something about his face, he looked like a meal dodger so rounded it out a little while also scaling up the entire head a tad (the image below isn't lined up properly) to achieve more child-like proportions.

 One more thing that was pointed out is that his shoulders were too broad. Looking at the comparison below the difference is striking. When it comes to making Odin I'll sculpt the complete piece in one instead of the head separately like I did with Thor to hopefully avoid missing key proportions.