Ryan Gilbert - WIP and polished work.
polycounter lvl 2
Hello, and welcome. Feel free to critique and comment what ever i post. Hell, rip it apart, its the only way i can get better 
1:1 reply's yalll. Check out my art station here to see my full projects and more! https://www.artstation.com/therealryan_
1:1 reply's yalll. Check out my art station here to see my full projects and more! https://www.artstation.com/therealryan_
Replies
In the case of the human body, your primary shapes will form the silhouette, and you'll want to work at a fairly low subdivision, just using the move brush as much as possible, not really cutting, carving, or sculpting to get those shapes. The secondary forms are then in defining muscle groups, personally i use clay buildup, smooth and move for this. I'll use trim-dynamic if i want to exaggerate or pre-define a plane on the surface for me to work on. THEN comes the tertiary stuff, veins, skin pulling, etc.
Make sure you examine a lot of reference, make sure it's varied, things like this are excellent: http://pulptastic.com/top-athletes-look-like-naked/
Remember that on top of all the muscle, there's fatty tissue and skin stretched over it. You only get extremely "cut" musculature from being grossly under-hydrated and stripping body fat down to crazy low levels (to the point that it actually harms the body). For more information on that, read up on what body-builders do before a show, or even Hugh Jackman's pre-moneyshot wolverine stuff... You know those crazy ultra-veined scenes in his movies? He put his body through hell for those 2 second shots.
You should also work a lot on posture and making sure your sculpts are posed in natural, neutral positions. No smiles, no smirks, no straight locked arms. Relaxed, and neutral, always. Pre-posing your sculpts has very limited uses, and if you want to work in games, it's pretty much the biggest no-no.
And finally, try not to rely too much on IMM brushes that you haven't made yourself while you're still learning to model. I know it's tempting to make your shit look good with some flashy inserts. But they actually do the opposite, they draw a lot of attention to the bad work, because they're so obvious.
I do see where you are coming from and i'm going to make sure i think about in my next sculpts. I also work on a low sub divide, under 10k on most which is still high but I find it easily manageable, I Zremesh all the time to make it low poly too. I do think i need to focus more on the Silhouette more and I do forget about it when i'm on for a long time.
As for the posed stuff that's for Phillipa's assignment and that needs to be posed for the keyshot renders ( I know real time is where its at, but that's not what i'm going for with this one, i should drop the IMM parts though that's true. I have stopped using and just make my own after you last mentioned that but i just wanted to out something there quickly and I just wanted to post it
and those references look real useful. I remember when this came out it was lol. There was a story of a boxer who spent 2 days in a sauna to make weight for a fight. I cant imagine that felt nice lol.
Currently this torso is too harsh, everything is far too defined, with very little subtlety. It doesn't read as female, it reads as male with breasts, because the female form is far more subtle than what you have here. Keep these up though and you will start to see improvement if you approach it the right way.
Also, there's far more to learning to make characters than just doing a likeness sculpt. You really should retopo and texture these as well, because your low poly work is probably the weakest part of your reportoire.
I'd erase 70% of the detail you have because it looks like the faces have two different skulls, and with a difference at the fundamental level all the detail on top of that is noise.
The lips and cheek bones are looking pretty good but everything surrounding them is throwing it off.
Your head comparatively is much smaller and more squished than the reference.
The top of the head and width of it is off as well, I say going back and nailing proportions of the face before getting into a single wrinkle will help tremendously.
I know its not perfect. I'm getting frustrated with my abilities becasue i cant get it looking perfect. where do you think need improvements? specific regions? I have been staring at this for too long and i'm going blind and drawing blanks.
Oh and Lee, I am going to re-top it. probably will end up doing it a a couple times to make it good. this is just the sculpt bud.
UPDATE:
So i have spent the last couple hours going over the model trying to make it perrrrrrfect. but damn, the guy has ever changing eye shape and 'under brow'. one image his bottom lid is flat, another its curved, the under brow dips down more, the top eye lid stretches up and in more into the socket. I don't think im done but. its getting there. i think.
Really, you'd be better off deleting the top two subdivisions, and redoing them without symmetry turned on.
For a great example of this, see:
Notice Adam only keeps symmetry on until the basic likeness is locked down, turning it off as early as ~40 seconds into the timelapse. Yes he turns it back on again when doing macro level changes (bone structure, jaw position etc.), but he turns it off again when he gets back into the actual sculpting.
I would love to hear any feedback or critique! I'm super rusty.
The clothing I was going to do in Marvellous designer for the cloth, but I couldn't figure our how to get it to wrap around the body and interact with the armour/straps properly without it clopping all over the place and looking bad.
oh I also made a bunch of variations you can see in the marmoset viewer on the artstation post!
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rrNQ2