A hammer made specifically for my goat sona. Forged by hand in the depths of the underworld, taking resources from the natural landscape there. Heavy durable steel alloys that flow red hot from the ground. Still-living wood taken from the glowing bushes that have grown accustomed to the intense heat of hell. Leather from long deceased creatures, tanned by the heat of lava pools.
This is my best work so far, I'm very proud of it.
Modeling and texture baking done in Blender, textured in ArmorPaint.
Eventually I'll make an even lower res version (at the behest of my friend) that will target around 300 tris. More optimized than even the 1k tri model.
This was my first actual try using ArmorPaint for something that has multiple pieces. Utilizing a color ID map helps a lot as ArmorPaint can turn those to masks for each material or layer. I also ended up smashing my head against the wall for a bit trying to figure out why my FBX was being fucked up when importing to ArmorPaint. Turns out AP just doesn't like FBXs or something. I'd recommend OBJs the most since you can separate the mesh by material on import. I'm still not sure how I feel about ArmorPaint, but I'll continue using it more and eventually write up a little review of it in its current state.
Baking the high poly mesh down to the low poly went surprisingly smooth. Had to adjust the auto-extruded cage a bit so there wasn't any overlapping, but otherwise it looks great I think.
I did use AP for the primary texture work, but I couldn't help myself to some additional procedural effects and little details in Blender. AO stuff, the animated emissive wood, and some extra normal map texture was added after the pass through ArmorPaint. Then all that gets baked down to the low poly mesh.
Despite the hassles of baking things, I do get a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of the process. Something about seeing that unoptimized mess of a base mesh get put onto something that runs way better is super satisfying to me. The SimpleBake addon is probably the best purchase you could make if you do a lot of texture baking. You can rapidly iterate through bake settings to work out bugs, sure beats the whole song and dance of the regular baking workflow in Blender.
Now I just need to actually make my goat sona's model. Figuring out how to do the fur is a nightmare.
Low poly wireframe. I could definitely trim off some fat here and there to get down closer to 300 tris.