Heavy hitter - Tree creature

FloHäckh

Hey guys,

I am new to 3D modelling and wanted to give a shot. I am working with a small team on a game and being the concept artist and concepting momentarily not so important, I felt the need to help in another department. So I took one of my concepts and starting modelling it.

This is supposed to be a low-poly-ingame model, without doing a high-poly first.

I did some texture-painting before, but modelling not so much. I would love tips and crits on design, but also later I will definitely need help with UV-layout and render to texture since I am a bit of a scatter-brain and technical stuff always poses a challange for me.

Anyway, this is what I ve got so far. I would love to give it that wow-ooomph-feeling of clear silhouette and great color and light. Also Jessica Dinh's stuff is something I really love.

I changed the christmas tree to a more round tree, because I felt like the christmas tree was a bit silly. Also I gave him legs, because our animator/3D guy/interface guy told me so ^^

I want to be really smart with the textures, so I thought of using instances for the leave canopy. Is there a way to see if I did make a copy or an instance, after making multiple objects, or do I see that only WHILE doing mutliple objects?

FloHäckh

Finally done, crits and comments very welcome.

Cordero

I would consider putting smaller details all over the model, right now it feels a bit like a rough block out! try and add veins to the wood, and depth to the texture. If you check this reference you linked above, you can see that there is a 3D feeling even to the flat texture, the "veins" on the texture has thickness to it, and even the bigger "veins" are separated and cut with smaller details. Also you can see that there is saturation variation in Jessica's work here, she uses not only one tone of brown, but many! I suggest you apply some subtle saturation changes to the texture aswell.. you might not notice it with bare eye, try and use the color picker and check how much she varies the colors, because too much and too obvious changes are distracting.
the glowing eye looks nice, it's good that you painted in the light radiating from it.
the vegetation is a bit even for me right now, the leaves are evenly distributed, even the spaces in between them are basically equal.. if you check Jessica's work, the leaves are chaotic, they go in every direction, they have varied space between them, and they overlap each other, some are below, some are on top which gives off a natural feeling, which is good if you do vegetation! 
good luck with it!