Stoneman, help with oldschool

zasraneTTs

Hi there!
Here is the stoneman creature I was making quite a long ago. My idea was to make a creature with a single diffuse texture. But now I understand that it is not totally awesome at all. The main prob is I do not have a good idea what is going wrong.

Here is what I started with


Modeling is good to my mind


And here is the final textured version


Looking forward to community help!

DOG-GY

He needs strong ambient occlusion. Also throw a tad bit of green or blue into the mix.

Vailias

More contrast, less mirroring, and greater color variation will help a lot.

Really push the darks on some of the crevasses. Also you might want to alter the hue of the highlighted and or shadowed areas more. Depending on how you want your texture to read you can go with warmer or cooler shadows, as well as desaturating them some.
Warm shadows on downward facing areas and cool highlights tend to give an outdoor feel to things, while the reverse (warm highlight and cool shadow) can give extra form and depth simply by virtue of color psychology.

The obvious mirror seam down the front of this guy really hurts the character. The whole front of him is a point of interest, and the mirroring just grabs attention away from the character.
Even if you just separately unwrap a section of the front so he's not obviously reflected it will help immensely.

Also add more hue variation to the rocks themselves. a bit of mottling of color as well as the mottling of value you have going will also add to the character.

The bits of glowy red and blue in the head are nice, yet very very subtle. This isn't bad, but it might tie the guy together a bit more having some of the blue (or red) visible in other places throughout the character, hinting at its life force or somesuch, or heck just patches of lichen here and there would add some character.

Baddcog

I think its pretty good, those pics are small though.

Mainly I think the larger muscles need defined a bit more, like the back is made up of so many small rocks, I think that should be pretty large slabs. Like the hands.

I'd make his quads wider too, just pull out some verts and make them thicker.

Ampaist

the blue is a nice touch, i would add more of it around the cracks in the rock like in the concept but Vailias pretty much said everything that i can think of right now