Oh god haha, I can't wait to see the render for this, love when a bit of humor is mixed in xD
Very nice clean retopology! Aye, it is difficult with other responsibilities. I'm also taking this contest as an opportunity to better myself.
Look forward to seeing your texture passes, if hand painted I can picture him as a Riot/Blizzard style character!
hey thanks Rath, been really hard getting things done, been baking maps while ive been slaving away concepting characters. only now just chucked them into marmoset for test renders and its heartbreaking that they look pretty bad theirs a lot of issues... might have to paint over what xnormals have produced
adding A O maps help Hide some glaring normal map seams and stuff butttttt i dont wanna hide behind AO.... still got some weird stuff under the bears nose
Your Teddy turned out way better than I thought in the first place.
If you would not point out the error I would have not seen them, I think I would fix some in photoshop, but I am a newbie with baking? And if you can manage a better bake would be great.
Hey Alien I noticed that you needed some help baking out the maps in Xnormal. I looked at the image above and maybe you could do somethings to fix those issues. The weird hard line could be vertices that haven't been welded together. The nasty artifacts can be fixed by expanding the cage out a little more in that area (sometimes that gives you more artifacts because the geometry is so close together) . The rim around the button can be fixed by adding more geometry and you'll get rid of the jagged look to it around the edge. The low res detail can be corrected but scaling up the UVs in that area or fixing the UVs all together. Remember that theres no limit to geometry or textures in this contest so you could probably create different texture sets to make it look even better. I cant really see whats going on in the lower image there. I tend to over work on my normal map and fix it as much as possible so I dont have issues with the other maps I need to bake out. I hope that helps you a bit. Post up more issues if you'd like more help on this.
Thank you so much for your advice Nico, I greatly appreciate it dude 
ill admit i have cut some corners in particular with the belt having multiple bits of geo for a texture set in an attempt to save me some time as i think it maybe a push for me to get this finished on time. but it seems to have caused me a lot of issues instead hahahaha.
Yeah it happens... but sometimes spending a bit more time on somthing on these things assures you zero issues later on. Its good to catch them in time though. Hope you're able to correct these issues so your character looks amazing 
It may be helpful to bake out some of the chunkier bits directly in zbrush with projection. It gives the most seamless bakes I find for certain organic pieces.
Love how the character is developing!
Hey alien head, why to I end up making freinds with the wierd people, anyways looks good. Did you watch any of the ZBrush summit stuff. And your teddy look so much more agressive then on the skecth - its for the better, I never saw a happy gladiator
hahaha well I'm weird and im more than happy to be friends with anyone on here who's interested https://www.facebook.com/daniel.holland.92
anyway, I know its unprofessional as hell so i wont name any names but i have a client from hell.... glad he left me alone for the day so i got pretty much all my baking done today and painted some stylized maps. thanks for the kind comments and advice guys. Hahaha tell me about it in an attempt to cut some corners and also try my hand at game res i did cause a lot of issues that i had to go back and fix edges, normals and uvs hahaha.
Is this solely going to be handpainted?
Yeah I think it will be the best way to get a child fantasy book like fell which brings me back to should I have texture fur or simulated fur. I also hope I get faster at paiting textires lol.
Wonderful textures! Well done. Hand painted textures are challenging for me. And the shield looks nice and battered.
How would you do the specular highlights, painted on or a specular map blending with the texture?
Thanks rath I appreciate it. Most of the spec you see is painted just using the hard round brush in photoshop but I do have a slight shader gloss and reflection going on too just to help pop a little bit more.
I recently rewatched this video http://polycount.com/discussion/136891/blizzard-style-textures some great tips on painted texture painting the dude works for blizzard best guy to learn from in regards to painted textures 
thanks for the vid
Now ur secret is mine, mine I say!!! MUHAHA
NIce! Love the hand painted style
Nice man! Another good reference is the DOTA2 character breakdown, they talk about their techniques and methodologies, might be a good gander, can't look at your discussion link right now so idk how extensive it is.
