Apologies for the lack of updates - I moved from an apartment to my first house, which turned out to be quite a process!
I was able to complete the UVs on the armor (regular and lightmap), as well as bake my high/low for my normals and AO. For the high poly, I imported to ZBrush and gave it a nice polish pass. I also made sure to explode the mesh before baking to achieve clean results. Additionally, I tried a plugin for Maya, Auto Smoothing Groups: https://cubebrush.co/shadowballgames/products/a8eeqw/auto-smoothing-groups-v1-3-for-maya
It worked like a charm, even on a complex mesh like this! I highly recommend using it, especially if you're used to getting good smoothing group results in 3Ds Max.
I want to create a bit of a damage pass through height maps, and then move onto the rest of the texturing. From there, I can duplicate the armor over to the other side of the body for the sake of efficiency. I'm also looking forward to baking and texturing her weapon (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/LzyQP), and then moving onto a diorama environment of sorts. I'm still trying to figure out what that environment will look like!
Other helpful resources I used:
https://80.lv/articles/learn-to-make-killer-props-for-video-games/
https://80.lv/articles/tutorial-perfect-baking-for-video-games/
https://80.lv/articles/how-to-build-a-video-game-gun/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imq5uQZ50sY
Thanks for reading!
-Kim