Videogame Character Development - High poly creation.

Once I had the low polygonal mesh at a point which I was happy with, I began the process of transporting the meshes into Mudbox one at a time for the creation and manipulation of higher poly pieces.

I began with the head, taking the low mesh, sending it to Mudbox as a new scene and increasing the subdivision level to 5, to give myself a highly enough detailed mesh to sculpt in some facial features.
Using mainly the Sculpt, Wax, Flatten and Smooth tools I set about sculpting in details on the high polygonal mesh which would resemble a more realistic facial representation.

I also used a stencil for the facial scar my character has, and another for the lips, in an attempt to achieve a realistic looking surface bump. Combined with the tools, the stencils proved to be a useful tool for development.

I also used the grab tool to reshape my characters nose, as the bridge of the nose was very wide to begin with, making it slimmer.

The smaller details, such as the nostril detail and the definition to the chin were sculpted inward by holding CTRL whilst using the sculpt tool.

One piece of the character I was hoping to make look particularly good was the boot, as cowboy boot detailing can be somewhat tricky, I decided to again use stencils and sculpt into the surface via the stencil.

The placement of the stencil itself was somewhat tricky and needed to positions just right to make the pattern work with the shape of my boot.

I used one stencil for the pattern on the side of the boot, and a separate stencil for pattern on the upper of the toe. Using a low strength and a reasonable brush size I built the pattern onto the surface of the boot using the sculpt tool.

I didn't run into many problems whilst modelling the higher poly meshes as a whole, though whilst working on the head, I finished the ear only to find I was working without the geometry being mirrored.
Whilst there may have been other ways to rectify this, I took the head back into Maya, removed the half of the head which had not been sculpted into, mirrored the geometry in Maya and sewed together the halves, making use of Maya 2016's merge threshold for extra accuracy, as Maya 2015 was grouping multiple vertices around one point, a result which was not desirable for further work within Mudbox.

Another issue I faced within high poly creation, was the breaking of UV's within my high poly boot, the original high poly mesh corrupted and could not be read by Mudbox, this meant re-exporting the high poly mesh to Mudbox from Maya.

Upon importing the model back into Mudbox, I was confronted with an apparent lack of US and as such could not paint the model, this resulted in a re-sculpt of the high poly, after transporting the low poly into Mudbox once again. Luckily this issue didn't hold me back for long and I had a fresh high poly boot sculpted and was ready to paint not long after.

Possibly the most difficult part of my high poly modelling was to be my Bionic arm. Whilst I had a vision in my head of what I wanted the arm to look like, I was not quite sure how to go about making it a reality. I used a stencil but initially the arm didn't look right, and so I left the arm to be returned to at a later time.

When I came back to sculpting the arm I had a little more idea of how I wanted to go about the sculpt, how I wanted the arm to appear, and utilising an image from one of my design boards in the concepting stage, was able to make an effective stencil and build on the arm as desired.
The final piece did not come out 100% as I had planned, but I was still happy with how the arm came out in the sculpt itself.

Having edited each piece of low polygonal mesh in Mudbox, including the other arm, both hands and the legs, the stage felt complete, I rounded off this stage of the character creation. This allowed me to begin the poly painting process.