Realism - OC Inaise Project

After my successful attempt at making and assembling hair cards ( for full documentation look here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aGNLkX ) my conclusion was to make a full body version of this project for further training. And with training I mean to make a fullbody lowpoly version. The concept art has everything that a challenge can provide, i.e. hair style, clothing layers with various fabrics, fur attachement, making fantasy concept look realisitc in general etc...

Attention:
Since the head and the body are two different projects, they aren't one subtool. Of course in other gaming projetcs I would treat them as one mesh where they share one texture set.

-I started sculpting in tpose first of course, but for a better effect I changed it to the pose shown in the concept.
-I sculpted the body in two days. Then I started sewing the clothes in Marvelous Designer. Sewing everything took me roughly 10 hours.
- After reposing my sculpt in Zbrush with zspheres I imported it back to MD as a morph target for resimulation and editing. That took me roughly about 5 hours.
-Then I proceeded with retopo-ing the clothes in MD and assemble those parts in the UV section. After exporting my next step was to make some further edits in Blender and assign materials. All in all that step took me roughly about 10-12 h.
-After some more edits in Blender I created lowpoly versions of her shoes, accessoiries and weapons, including UV maps and materials assigning. After that I started with high to lowpoly adjustments, so that projecting in Zbrush wouldn't cause problems. Though before I switched to Zbrush I repositioned the hair cards also, so it would fit the new pose. All in all that work phase took about 6-7 hours.
-Before I did anything in Zbrush I opened my Marmoset render for the hair card project and used it as my base for the fullbody result. I reimported my newly posed things, like head, hair cards and eyes. After some hiccups with the eyes and some correctiosn here and there I had my base setup. (forgot my hour mark here)
-I spent 3-4 hours on a day to make further highpoly lowpoly adjustments in Zbrush this time and first projection tests.
-The next day I made final projections and started on the final version of the highpoly, which took roughly 5-6- hours.
-After 7 hours of more sculpting, exporting and editing in Blender, i.e. alpha adjustments my lowpolys had around 32.5k tris (we're talking about 3 texture sets: body, clothing and weapon)
-Now it was time to make the fur cards for the clothing. making, assembling in Blender and render setup in Marmoset took me about 7 hours. What I didn't think of is that I should have put the fur cards together with the hair cards, or better: the clothing to reduce the texture set amount. So my learning here is that I should think of the hair/fur cards placement at the beginning. Another thing I have to think about is, that when hair and clothing are interchangeable (i.e. DLC) that I should definitely put the clothing and clothing fur cards as one material/texture set.
-Now the last step is to texturize. In 6 hours I managed to bake and texturize two texture sets. The last one had some hiccups and had to get some UV editing (2 hours).
-Texturized the last texture set. Assembled all assets in Marmoset and rendered them. 10h

Texture sets are setup to be 2048x2048.

New Learnings:
-Even though I was pretty careful with hair/fur card placement and achieved an ok amount of tris, I still think there's still room to reduce poly count. Further training is to figure that out. This project proved to me why hair cards are such a tricky topic in the industry.
-Like I said before: Before I place and assign materials for texture sets, I need to consider where to place fur cards (if there are some to consider for the clothing texture set of course).
-My head to body basemesh is now on a lowpoly amount of 11 to 12k tris. I think that is a fair amount. Now I need to do the same for eye and jaw basemesh production, which I will fuse with the head/body texture set in the future.
-This project showed me how much I can reduce polycount in a realism work before it reaches its limits visual-wise. And how I need to work on textures to balance that out.

Time I needed:
-The head and hair card project took me roughly two weeks
-this body and clothing project took me around 15-17 days
-so approximately 4 weeks total