Carnage Kabuto (critiques requested)

JAXMP

Hey guys! long time lurker here, finally getting around to posting something.
I've been working on this guy for a couple of weeks and i'm kind of stuck on what to do to make him "pop" a little more, and some help would be appreciated
Here's a posed screenshot out of marmoset. It's 23,822 polys according to 3ds max. I'm using gloss/metalness workflow, which i'm pretty new to (used to doing the ol' diffuse+spec, but i'd like to get with the times), so some tips/advice on that front would be great too.

The references i used are just some screenshots from the show and a couple of pictures of beetles, as i wanted him to feel more like a beetle than just a buff guy with glowy bits, particularly in making him look heavily armored (this is also why i opted out of having all the veins)
Here's a couple more screenshots good ol' T-pose

JAXMP

bit of progress i guess, painted in some texture to make the plates look more like a beetle's shell's coloration and did a bit of gradients+edge highlighting. played around with the material stuff a bunch, starting to get the hang of metalness+gloss i think

Opilo

I really like this! The coloring makes it look little like real life action figure, but that's definitely not a bad thing. If i would have to criticize something, it's the eyebrow areas. Imo these could use just a little bumping up. It would make face more expressive. But it's a very minor thing and kinda personal preference. Overall, nice work!

BCos

Your posing is awesome, very emotive.  But that tension and muscle load  is not well-represented in the sculpt itself.  Carnage Kabuto, specifically his neck, was all about bulging veins and tendons.  In many of the mocks/references, these veins appear, even in the purple plate areas, as green glowing veins/fractures in the dark purple areas.  I might try and add some mixup between the plates and the neon green filler.  purple bits feel like islands, not muscle groups.  there's not many anatomical connections being implied in their shapes.  I know it's a hard ask to enhance that factor, as the purple pieces do have kind of plate armor-like qualities.

Overall i think the muscle groups/ purple bits have good shapes, but lack tension.  Just my input, as always take it with a grain of salt because I no expert.

JAXMP

Opilo

Yeah the brow definitely feels a bit bare now that i'm looking at it after some sleep (i did this yesterday but didn't post because my internet decided to derp out), i think it's because i plopped in a gradient to smooth gloss/metalness from the face into the horn so it's making it look dark and bare

BCos

Thanks! i'd agree that my version doesn't look as pumped as the anime one, but i wanted to make him have slightly more realistic proportions (which is my i made the head a little bigger and the neck a little shorter [going off the top left reference, note how the neck is much shorter on that one that on the one right next to it]), and that combined with having them be plates rather than muscles does make him look a bit more flat. I think in the anime the blue parts were actually his muscle, as he had just lost the brown plating, but i wanted it to be plates in this one because it looks more unique i think (as in i didn't just want him to look like a buff guy painted blue). I'll try painting in the veins into the glow map to see how it looks; the main reason i omitted them is that i thought they might make him look a bit busy, but who knows.
i'm not 100% sure what you mean by this

there's not many anatomical connections being implied in their shapes

i've mostly followed how they're separated in the show with a bit of nudging around so that they roughly correspond to major muscle groups, though now that you mention it, i'll try giving the plates some banding (like in the small rhino beetle's wings on the right) as to evoke the image of musculature a little more.