Hi everyone!
Finally I took the time to post the WIP for this fantastic challenge. I'm planning to do at least a weekly post to keep the project updated, with some nice suprises towards the end ;-)
My first week of WPs revolves around the concpet of the character and some initial blockouts on top of the CCBase. Nothing too fancy for now, the next couple weeks will amp up the fight quite a lot!

Here's a quick sketch done to grasp the bigger forms and ideas for the piece. She's gonna be a sci-fi pilot!



Here's the Base with some minor morphs that was send in Zbrush for further refinements and the suit blockout.



Suit blockout for the part to bake on the CCBase.



Blockout and some hardsurface pieces for the armor.



And here's the end of week1, with some body proportions adjustments.

See ya'all in week 2!

Update for week 2 and week 3!
Since week 2 was short and mainly focused on optimization, test bakes and so on I decided to post everything with the week 3, which was way more productive and interesting.
In week 3 I focused on the head, sculpting a custom face in Zbrush, with custom polypaint texture and a full set of custom expressions and wrinkle maps thanks to the FaceTools plugin. The results were pretty seamless and the wrinkles hold up very nicely with the test animations.

Here's the full before/after sculpting of the head.

Polypaint

Inside CC4

With the new hhead updated on the body I cleaned up the armor, made the lowpoly and hipoly inside Blender and then imported everything in Marvelous Designer for some clothes creation. I decided to add a sleeveless jacket for some style and here's the result in marvelous.


A quick detour in Blender for a cleanup and here's the model at the end of week 3, with everything retopologized, unwrapped and ready for texturing.