With rendering the hair and getting it back on track, I've also been working on getting the cart textured and ready to be rendered. After bringing the cart into substance painter, I baked it down from the high poly to get the wear details that I was looking for.
The challenge I had to deal with was actually going back into zbrush to bring the mesh detail down slightly. The original mesh with all of its detail was at well over 90 million polygons. As can easily be imagined, it didn't do well in Substance Designer. Even when breaking up the cart into many parts, it wouldn't bake down without crashing. Luckily, I was able to retopologize the mesh and bring down the polycount down all the way to about 5 million polygons for the entire cart!
With the mesh brought down to a more manageable size, I was able to start texturing it. I wanted to give the cart a worn look so that it seemed like it had been in the dragon's cave a while. I also wanted to incorporate a lot of reds and yellows into the cart. That way it would match the dragon as a character as well. By doing this, I attempted to have the cart be its 'own character' in a way.
