Hmmm, I just tried to post a long message with what I had been doing, got an invalid request and lost everything.

We'll try again shorter.

I have been working on making a lores mesh with the detail from a hires mesh baked onto it as a normal map.

The hires mesh is from Ten-24, it's their free male head model.

Has about 400,000 polys.

My mesh has about 2000 polys

Here is a link to a video of what I got

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W05DB8-U-bQ&feature=youtu.be

Ah, good, that worked. Now some details of how I did what I did.

First, I slowly made a mesh around the hires object, with care on getting the edge loops where they belonged and clean topology.

Then, I copied THAT mesh into another layer. I made a UV map of that mesh using ABF unwrap.

Then I copied THOSE polys into another layer

Those polys, which we subpatches, were frozen, and any unplanar polys were tripled.

(side note, make sure your UV map is set to Subpatch Interpolation BEFORE you freeze)

Now, I copied the Hires mesh into another layer, so I could triple and nonplanar polys on it.

Then, using PB Texture baker, I made the 3 maps for color, bump, and normals.

(side side note PB Texture baker wants faces, not patches and nonplanar makes issues. If in doubt, triple)

Then, I went back the the first copy on my mesh, the one I made the UV map on, copied IT, and put it in a new Lightwave Object.

This was surfaced with the three maps

Then I made the video I linked above, with the horrid lighting.

Today I went back in and adjust the original mesh to more closely match the hires mesh and did the preceedng process again,

with better results. Currently, the only glitchyness is at the earlobes, inside the nostrils, and I still have the corners of the lips misaligned.

I will post a link to the new video when I finish it.

And finished.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u7jwdEZkgw

Have constructed a semi-useable eye model, placed it in the model. 2 eyes add near 3000 polys to the model, but they are fairly un-optimized. I can drop that to about a quarter by bandgluing. Main idea was to develope a useable eye texture, and I think I have done so, here is a shot

Another video, this time with better mouth geometry and an attempt at sub surface scattering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5N-hELWH-U&feature=youtu.be