This was a 2 week art test where I had to create the head and hair of a specific subject. I was given the raw scan, the game low poly base mesh and reference pictures for the creation of the asset.
I started by using Wrap3D to adapt the scan to the low poly mesh. I then went to Substance Painter, where I baked the main maps, cleaned the normal map artifacts, and then created the color from the reference pictures using mainly the warp projection tool. Once the color map was created, the other maps were obtained via photomanipulation of the color map using various generators and filters in Painter.
After the head was in a good spot, I created the hair cap mesh to create the base hair volume and save on hair card tri count. The hair cap maps were baked from the head mesh to guarantee a seamless transition as much as possible. Then I added more Painter work to make sure all the hair cap maps looked good and the head and hair looked decent even without the cards.
The final part was the hair cards themselves, where the main focus was to create more of a hair breakup and hide the geo look of the hair cap.
I'm still thinking of refining this and add a bit more detail but I'll leave this here for now since this was my stopping point at the end of the test.