Hi All,
With this project I want to focus on
This is my first project in which I want to add sculpting and retopo in my overall workflow. I chose this object because it has some interesting surface detail like stitches and old leather look. It poses a nice little challenge and hopefully wont take me so long so as I loose interest.
Ref Images:
WOW!!! Those ref photos look almost real!!! Oh wait… They are! LOL!!
I think you have a good start going. Would love to see the final result.
Nice job! I predict that it will be hard to tell which are fake and which are real when you are done 
Modeling wise you seem to have nailed it already!
Thanks man. That means a lot.
Cant wait for the final result!!
Some comparison on texturing approaches that I tried:
So I tried three approaches…
The UI is easy to use but lacks some feedback like texture names and previews.
It has a node editor for brushes and materials so it will be quite powerful once it becomes a bit stable.
Armor Paint crashed on me sometimes and the interface is not there yet
Uses modern graphic APIs (DX 12 and Vulkan) under the hood.
Blender Shader and texture painting is great and fast, very responsive
Now its easier to setup but has no built in layers for painting and textures. It results in a lot of manual work with shader node editor.
Shader nodes are very powerful but has a learning curve. Quite complex materials are possible but it is also very easy to do something wrong in complex node setup.
Easy to learn and straight forward UI. Minimal learning curve.
Can work in layers. Has all the essential masks.
Great renderer but feels abit sluggish and has a bigger download size (~3GB, in comparison to Armor Paint ~17 MB, Blender ~130 MB). But it includes many built in materials and other data.
Painting is slow and lacks many essential features.
Multiple mesh (multi Texture Sets) support is missing.
I used it for stability and material layer support.
