finished the painting and sculpting i needed to do in zBrush, which wasn’t much. my zBrush phase now consists of: vertex painting material IDs for Substance Painter, making sure the various forms and layering of subtools are watertight for retopology in Topogun with the good ‘ol move brush, and lastly, decimating everything into a more bitesized polygon count and merging it all into a single subtool.
painting the decals for the ship was probably the most time consuming part, as it required creating various alphas for masking in Photoshop. making sure the outline is crisp is important at this stage to ensure segregation in Substance, so for the pieces with decals (arrows, bars, stars, etc) using zRemesher and re-projecting is essential for even poly distribution. it is not an instant process however, so i only bother doing this for the pieces are are more than one material.
tried to get a head start decimatingbat the end of the night while playing XIV, but the one-click “all” buttons on Decimation Master are incredibly unreliable. will have to decimate one by one tomorrow.