thanks everyone
Cral: about 1 or 2 days for a head, depending on the complexity of the haircut, and about 8 to 10 days for a whole body.
EricShawn: even maybe the best thing I’ve ever seen. period. This thread is legend, wait for it…, dary!
Big guns: I tried it, and it’s good stuff, but since you cannot render to texture and you have to cheat max to get a map of it, it’s useless for me.
Uber: pretty standard workflow, hi poly shapes in max, details in zbrush, retopologising to a low-poly version, bake in max, or zbrush using zmapper, or xnormal, or whatever, and texturing, using Ambient Occlusion, and Crazybump stuff. For the jewels, or fine détails, I use mental Ray to render the object, with a bit of reflection, something nice to look at, and using the same setup I render a normal map, and a little bit of photoshop tweakings later, I’ve got some nice diffuse, specular, normal and opacity map; i’ll show you an exemple of that if I can take some screenshot out of Ubisoft.