Hey guys, thanks for all the nice comments, we really appreciate it!
To answer a few questions
The head topology was ended at the clavicle - like what you see in the renders. There were a few times we needed more topology for the chest, like if we had an open shirt for instance. For that we would just add an extra piece of geo to the costume meshes,
but those were edge cases.
The triangle count for the head mesh was around 13k, however we created lower res topo for background characters and lods. All head geo was shared, as well as uvs across all characters.
The poly count for entire character varied quite a bit, with background characters between 12 and 16k and main characters averaging between 40 and 60k. The main character, depending on costume would be as high as 80k.
Holy moly! This is an insane gallery!
Thank you so much guys for sharing all these models.
I’m pretty sure that The Order will help establish a new edge of quality for the next-gen games.
That’s some amazing work you got there
Cant wait to see what you will be coming up with for the next one 
I just wanted to answer a question posed earlier about the hair creation.
The hair process was definitely an involved path to completion. The base hair textures were created in Maya using Shave and a Haircut. Each ‘patch’ of hair was grown from a thin plane and groomed using the Shave tools. Once the silhouette and layering looked good, Mental Ray was used to render multiple passes (color, depth, occlusion, etc.). These passes were then composited in Photoshop. Additional precise hair strands were painted in Photoshop as well. It usually look around five unique patches to define the overall hair shape. When completed, they were all atlased in one UV sheet. The main reason we used Shave was because of the high fidelity alpha it could output, as well as the natural look of hair layering. In our engine, the hair was rendered as an alpha material, so we could retain all of the soft detail and avoid the crunchy artifacts of alpha test hair.
The hair cards were all placed on the head model by hand. In many cases we could share some prior work between characters. We used Mari to texture an under-paint layer of hair on the head models, mainly to aid in transition areas around the forehead. Mari was also used for flow maps for the hair to direct the anisotropic spec.
The hair material utilized a shift map to breakup the hair’s specular response. This helped to separate the hair ‘strands’ as the highlight was shifted based on the direction of the flow map, by an intensity defined using the grayscale values of the shift map. The material also had a secondary specular parameters to give the appearance of backscattering.
wow. Amazing work. I will have this game when I have my PS4.
Superior!!!
Dear Nathan, thanks for the artbook link, I also saw a review by Parka of your artbook: http://www.parkablogs.com/content/book-review-blackwater-archives-art-of-order-1886
Saw it, loved it, bought it 
great stuff all around guys!
Awesome stuff guys!! Congrats! I haven’t played the game yet, but one thing for sure is that the art quality is amazing.
thank you for sharing this!
Very very fantastic characters!!!
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Could you say me more or less how many days need for a final character?
WOW these are incredible.
Question: in post #5 the character sculpts have fuzz on their jackets and scraves. Was this actually used in the bake? or was it more of a we can do this in sculpt because it looks bad ass but it really serves no real purpose?
Great Stuff all round here!amazing attention to detail,well done.
Absolutely stunning! Thanks for the post. Great inspiration!
Wow you guys just raised the bar for characters. Really inspiring!
Incredible attention to detail.
How much of the clothing was done in Marvelous Designer, and how much by hand?
Absolutely amazing!!
Thank you guys so much for sharing these screenshots and answering questions. It provides great insight to the industry and inspiration to us all.
By any chance will you be at the ZBrush Summit?
Thanks again guys!
snowzbc - we didnt adopt marvelous designer until late in production so most of what you see is done by hand, with the exception being Lakshmi’s scarf. Some things were blocked out in marvelous to get a quick base as well.
mind blowing work guys! this game is an visual masterpiece. inspiring in every single detail :Dsmall_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamond
My god, talk about iron patience! I love the differing levels of Lycan forms and how you made these creatures actually look as though the curse of lycranthropy truly is a form of disease, and how it seems that it’s bursting and excreted out of the human form so well, that it almost looks painful!