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DustyShinigami said:

One thing I'm going to find quite difficult, and it will certainly take some time to get to grips with, is knowing what and when to add things to the design to improve the visual appeal. Especially if it's something like this where there's more freedom to do that compared to a regular human character.

Yep. That’s kinda our whole thing: developing a strong visual library and design sense. And without those, we have references to help us out.

From what I can see of Gio: he is strongly looking to nature and experimenting through his studies to try to find ways of incorporating those things into a more fantastical realm.

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I think you’re making some good improvements from your previous iterations.

While my own personal tastes tells me it’s still vague in some areas, I can definitely see where you are making much more intentional choices about what some of the secondary forms are and how they fit into the larger shapes. Keep at it!

A bit more progress with it. Still unsure if it's going in the right direction though. If it's 'readable' and makes sense.

Neat.

Though I'm thinking you might want to try out trim sheets for spacecraft like these. Trim sheets allow you to get much closer to a ship, and still see a lot of detail. You should check out the work done by Millenia on Fractured Space: https://polycount.com/discussion/206582/mining-station-fractured-space

DustyShinigami said:

So I'm not sure if my way of thinking for this next stage is on point (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), but now that those transitions of those main shapes are done, I'm seeing some additional more subtle shapes under the surface. And I guess I was trying to implement those last time, but got carried away and overdid it. But I think I need to try and add them, but to ensure they're more subtle and flow with the muscles.

Yeah, that’s about the right idea. You want those secondary forms to serve some sort of purpose whether it be as a function of anatomy or just something there to add to the visual design- It’s all there to support those bigger shapes.

Maybe what might help in your specific case with the torso is to take a closer look at those shapes your seeing and decide if it's an underlying muscle, or fat deposit, or bony landmark, or tendon, or just something there you see that makes it look cool for aesthetics; and have that inform your sculpting insofar as needing to integrate the form, or softening/hardening transitions, adding/taking away volume, or removing it all together. My opinion was that I wasn’t getting any of those reads and thus made the overall design of the torso less readable.

What could also help (apart from zooming out and looking at the model as a whole) is to work the sculpt around the full character at once rather than a small part in isolation as it can be easy to get myopic and over develop one area and not realize until the end that the arm doesn’t really relate to the shoulder and the shoulder doesn’t relate to the torso, etc. (hey, which is another kind of hierarchy of form…Ha!)

Okay, I've pretty much gone through both of those linked videos. There's still under 50 minutes left of Gio Nakpil's video; he's currently on tertiary details. His approach to doing secondary forms on a head certainly makes sense and cleared up some doubt. When I was doing my mentorship with Henning Sanden, and I was working on heads, I think I pretty much got it after he showed me in a video. It's just for a creature's torso, like I'm working on, it doesn't seem as obvious, if that makes sense...? I'm not sure if it's because Jason Martin implemented some additional shapes to make things look more interesting.

So I'm not sure if my way of thinking for this next stage is on point (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), but now that those transitions of those main shapes are done, I'm seeing some additional more subtle shapes under the surface. And I guess I was trying to implement those last time, but got carried away and overdid it. But I think I need to try and add them, but to ensure they're more subtle and flow with the muscles.