Fantasy game protagonist- Boy

Here is the protagonist for the fantasy game project.  It was based on the concept art of one of my group members. i started off with dynamesh Zbrush as I feel more comfortable going from high poly to low poly workflow. I forgot about belt straps, but i think it still looks good.  To improve it I could look more at the concept art and make it look more alike. In this one I did use the concept art as a reference, but later on I just left it behind; I think the character still looks quite similar to the concept

Concept Art done by Alex P.

Here I began the retopology in Maya.  Retopology is always my least favourite part of the process (and of course Uvs). I tried to make the loops go around the arms and facial muscles. However I made a mistake and made the arm loops too far away from the shoulders, causing a visible seams later on. After making the Uvs I proceed with making the rig.  Following a tutorial (as it was my first time) everything was going pretty well but when I mirrored the control curves I encountered some issues; the orientation of the curves was facing a wrong direction and I couldnt fix it. After a long time of struggle, i found out there's a premade rig inside Maya, It DID hurt to find this out after such a long time. 

After rigging the character and painting skin weights, i had a go at making the eyes control curves. It did work, but after importing the model into the engine, the eyes dissapeared. So I removed the control curves. Now I think the issue was in parenting the eyes to the rest of the model, instead of smooth binding them. 

One issue I encountered was wrong thumb bone placement. It somehow got misplaced and I didn't notice until the character was animated and put into the game. every animation inside the engine causes the thumb to look broken, which isn't good. To avoid It I could be more careful and check each bone for correct placement.

               

Attempt at rigging

Attempt at eye rig

Final model

The diffuse map was made inside DDo with Ambient occlusion on top of it; first I started off with a basic color scheme, there I let DDO take me through it's process. However Normal maps were done inside Maya separately, then put together inside photoshop. I did it this way because I made a huge mistake of re positioning the model (low poly) before baking the maps etc. and later on it was hard to align the low poly and high poly models.

Pre DDO 

After DDO