The Hand?

So the pinnacle of our level would have to contain a relic of some sort, making a relic is one thing but presenting the relic in a way that it actually look significant is another. I had some ideas but my favourite was two hands from a pedestal, and the relic floating in between. So I had to model a hand (obviously the other hand can be duplicated and flipped).
I hadn't modeled a hand before so I started from reference and my own drawings.

I started to google hands and just generally look at how the lines work and what patterns there are in the hand, and of course, I spent a good time looking at my own hand in several positions as awkward as that was.

Initially I thought I'd start modeling the hand using ZSpheres, but I tried it for about 5 minutes and realised how irritating it was, so I started anew. I made a Dynamesh sphere and just started to mask circles on it and pull them out using transpose. This looked absolutely horrible to begin with, but I just kept working at it.

As you can see from the hand above, well if I can even call it that, it didn't look like a hand at all. Everything about it was wrong, positioning, the anatomy and the proportions.

Like I said I just kept on working on it. I used the transpose tool in correlation with masking a single finger to re-position them firstly, I needed to get the feeling they were grasping something and not waving hello. Using transpose to scale and position was amazing, I didn't need to figit with using the Move brush, or resculpt any detail, I could alter everything just using transpose.

So once I was satisfied with the positioning, I just had to add more realistic detail, but I did keep in mind that this hand wasn't a hand made of bone and flesh, it was one made of stone, so the detail I put only had to be significant detail, the detail you'd notice from far. With that in mind, and still looking at my own hand several times I feel I got most of the important details down.

A stone hand, wouldn't be so smooth unless it was just made, and this hand is supposedly thousands of years old, ancient. So I had to make it look ancient, and give it a stone texture. I just used the default alphas on ZSub, to get that stone texture right. I tried using spray as a brush stroke initially but it was way too overwhelming so I just chose drag rectangle, and did it little by little all over. Once I was happy with that I could move onto texturing it.

Again as I said before I wanted to be consistent with textures so I used the same rocky mossy texture I've previously used, this time I did use the spray brush stroke in conjunction with drag rectangle too so I could get some finer detail in there.

Eventually for the finishing touch I just added a bit of a 'rock' at the bottom of the hand, so you can really tell it's not supposed to be attached to any lifeforms or creature of some sort.
Now a problem for me at this stage would be how to correctly make this model a low game resolution asset. Previously I had always brought models in from maya and just textured and did finer details in ZBrush, but for this one I completely made it in ZBrush and had no idea how to make it low res.
After some research I found two options, Decimation Master and QRemesher.
After using the Decimation Master, well, what it did was a little too literal, it decimated my mesh completely, this didn't work so I tried the QRemesher option.

Target Polygons Count - This was the only option I messed about with, as it would affect the output polygon count of what I wanted. The high resolution model was 100,000 polygons, I didn't want to lose too much detail so I chose 3,000. I did attempt numbers like 1,000 and 500 but they destroyed the model losing way too much detail.

This was the outcome of using Qremesher, I found this to be surprisingly good and I decided to keep going on with it. I applied the same texture as the high res one on top of this but of course it looked way too low res, and I had lost all the important detail I wanted from the mossy rock texture. I had not done this before so I just thought I'd edit the texture map directly in Photoshop.

Once I was done I exported the .obj of the mesh, the texture maps and the normal maps too. I was ready to test out how it would look with the new textures I adjusted in Photoshop.

This is how the hand looked like after I exported and imported it into Maya. I was happy with the result as it had a relatively low polycount and still kept all the significant detail. Significant detail meaning the positioning and anatomy. You can look at it from far away and see that it is a hand quite clearly, so that was the job done with the model.

I finally applied the texture and normal maps to the model. As I did with all the rest of the models, I pretty much turned everything down or off on the Specular Shading panel, this is obviously because they don't shine or reflect, it's supposed to be ruined rock. 

The above images are how it looked in maya and two rendered out images. I was really happy with the result as this was the first time I had made something high resolution in Zbrush and successfully made a low resolution model of it with correct textures and mapping.
If I was going to do this again I would definitely do much more research into the process of how to turn a ZBrush high resolution mesh into a game resolution one, I sort of had to figure it out as I went along during this asset but I learnt a few new things in Zbrush such as Decimation Master and QReremesher, and of course modelling a hand! It was my first time doing any hand anatomy and I was happy with the result.
The method I used - Dynamesh, actually worked surprisingly well, I thought I'd just give it a go and see how it went but it turned out that would be the method I would use for the entirety of the asset.