Realism attempt, need help

DietCoke

I'm having some trouble with hair, and with some other stuff.
I used a shit load of triangles on the hair, and I think the volume and general shape are pretty good, but it's definitely still reading as a bunch of feathers. It's not blending smoothly. Any advice?

Also any critiques or comments or anything at all would be greatly appreciated.

BIGSOG

neat-o! but your textures are too smooth and you might want to try unifying the normals of your hairplanes to give it more consistent lightning. oh and somehow the skin on the hands looks like rubber, dunno why though. lol

DWalker

The hair reminds me of feathers- it's quite obvious that they are in distinct clumps.

ysalex

Looking pretty good, a couple of things:

1 - AOcclusion in Marmoset is killing you, particularly in the hair. My suggestion would be to bake a small amount into the diffuse, and then keep AO off in marmoset.

2 - His skin looks dead. Perhaps a bit of marmoset subdermal (not too much) will help, but I think the main problem is that there is little variation in the texture. The hand is the best example of this. The skin is all one color, even on the veins. There is no hair, no red shifts where you'd expect them (knuckles, palms). There is also no fine detail. I don't know how 'realtistic' you're actually going for, or what your constraints are, but he's going to need quite a bit more skin texture to get any sort of believability.

3 - the straight light is killing off any contrast. Take images with partial shadows to give a better impression of depth and contrast.

4 - The jeans are really clean, considering how dirty the back pockets are. Makes them look pasted on.

5 - The thumb arcs out from the hand like it's a radial. But thumbs are generally made of two straight lines (wrist to first knuckle, then first knuckle to second knucle), and then a counter curve that moves away from the palm. So the entire thumb is bending in the wrong direction.

djgardner

Yeah, the hair looks really bad. lol. it honestly looks hand painted the hair.
Body proportions look off to me, and his hand doesn't look human.

If you plan on getting into character art as a career, I'd say you have a look of improving to do. Take up some life drawing classes near you, read anatomy books and just draw, draw, draw, zbrush, zbrush, zbrush!
Character artists are probably the most talented people in the art department. It's a true skill to be a great character artist; takes lots of time and hard work.

Don't get me wrong, it's a decent start so far. Much better than characters I've ever attempted, but that's also why I stopped doing them.

DietCoke

BIGSOG: Unified normals, got it. I will look into that! Thanks!

ysalex: Excellent advice man, thanks! Do you think the facial skin is looking alright? The hands are literally just a flat skin color with BLACK AO baked in at this point, so they are absolutely looking rubbery and dead. Also, I have the body and hands on one material, and the face on a separate one, allowing me to use some subdermal business. I should probably make some room on the face texture for the hands then?