More like... polyGONE. Hehehe.

I've completed the texturing/shading of my polygon boot model, and I'm pretty happy with the result!

For the turnaround below I rendered from a single master layer so there's no post adjustment except adding in a background and vignette. I might go back and render out different passes to experiment with in Nuke. 

I used UVLayout to map the boot, which I found to be far superior to Maya's in-built UV mapping tools. My biggest regret for the entire project was making the texture map 2k, in hindsight I'd make it 4k instead. The lack of resolution is apparent, even at 720p. 

Capturing the texture images was a pain, as the leather boot is relatively shiny and the surfaces are extremely wrinkled... making it difficult to get even detail. There was a lot of adjustment in Photoshop to correct for this. Aligning the images over the UV map was a serious challenge given the structure of the boot, which is made of up only a couple of large sections. Blending the different texture images together while retaining the intricate stitching detail was tedious, and is still not perfect by any means. 

I created a bump map and specular map from the same files, which definitely add a lot of realism to the final output. I'm extremely happy with the overall aesthetic considering I've next to no experience UV mapping/texturing/shading. Here are the different maps used. 

Bump Map

Specular Map

Diffuse Map