I picked that one up a while ago. Lots of good general lighting info as well as some practical hands on stuff for 3ds max. For the price, its a great start.
Just a practical tip, try colorizing the different muscles with vertex colors while modeling (very handy feature in Wings3D, not sure it it is possible in what ever app. you are useing).
I don't mean to be a dick- MOST people that start out practicing 3d at home use pirated software... It's just another case of "you get what you pay for."
I'm sure it was the "real deal". Or at least as is much so as is possible anywhere these days. The whole wormwood thing has practically reached urban legend levels. Enjoy the drink for what it is.
I think it's weird that the ceiling looks like it had a puddle on it, if you look at reference there may be a few shiny areas where drips are getting through but not a big area. The graffiti looks a bit too copy/paste, maybe duplicate the pipes on the right hand wall and fill that wall with those? There's something off…
People generally use a cells or voronoi approach. It's not practical to grow veins in designer so you're stuck with that sort of thing. Which is why nobody has a good solution for cracks yet
It's probably because you may have scaled those 2 parts at the object level at some stage. It's always good practice to reset xforms on all meshes when modeling is complete.
Oh, definitely. I'm all about the modularity. I just had bad practice when it came to blocking in-engine before... Thanks a lot for your answer. Really helpful advice :)
I know that, but I've not yet started studying digital sculpture, I might start working on some MudBox Tutorials in a few weeks/months. Yup! I'm doing this 'by hand' to practice.