kind of a troublesome day…
accomplished: laid out the uv’s and textured the wing section of the first boss model.
fights: had some problems early on in the day, everything i exported from zBrush was coming out with fragmented sections of polys. really strange thing it was. one mesh surface was two triangles and like 20k vertex. the *.obj file was under 20MB, and the mesh was like 200k points in zBrush, but it would import into Maya as 10M triangles!
anyway, the solution was: toggle EXPORT > GRP before export in zBrush
in addition, see added note on June 5th’s log. some info i thought i had nailed down regarding Substance Painter project settings, according to online documentation, was incorrect. as per the newer software versions, OpenGL normal maps and NO per fragment tangent computation is apparently the correct setting for exporting to Unity. however, i have not had the chance to test the pipeline all the way through and am currently using a smart material i made before i knew this… so for whatever reason, the textures look better WITH directX and compute per fragment.