The jacket and pants stitching phase went quickly, I did some cleanup on the panels, but it doesn’t appear to matter in the final renders.

I haven’t worked a lot over the Christmas/New year period.

I’m still trying to make the baking process simpler than my usual approach: Cut the model into separate baking scenes to go around the usual overlapping issues. The alternative seem to be the baking cage route. I found an interesting approach for tweaking the bake cage using a vertex group and a displacement modifier, and effectively “painting” the cage rather than manually shuffling the vertices directly, but it might not be enough for tight spots.

I’m going to try a few other approaches in the coming days. If all fail, splitting the bake is always possible.