I started drawing this character on and off in 2016, before I knew anything about Zbrush or how to model anything like that. After I became acquainted with Zbrush and other programs and finally felt ready to dive into this one.
The extra challenge was to make this for an old jedi knight academy game from 2003 running on the quake 3 engine, which means that there is a size limit and you must be aware of the polycount as well. These games back then didn't use PBR, so I had to bake down the texture from the curvature, thickness, AO, Normal map, roughness etc. into Diffuse, Specular and Emission.
The size of the model ended up being around 13300 tris with 3 LODs, 100%, 50%, 25%, 12%. The lowest LOD was 1600 tris, made to improve on performance for the other players.
What's most important for these old games is actually the vert count. If it's anything above 10 000 then it's likely to crash whoever has the model. This was 8700 verts, but I made LODs anyway just to be sure.
This is not the first model I've made with these limitations, but by far the most complicated.
I have since worked on it again applying a method to use PBR with a community created shader system.
