A good quick way to get something nice looking is to darken the diffuse lots and really brighten the specular for metal areas. then add scratches to specular and tweak, tweak, tweak ;)
Looking quite good already! I would suggest maybe adding a little more color variation on the diffuse for the vegetation maybe, and perhaps even more saturation too.
Thanks Mospheric. I've decided I prefer doing props over full scale enviros... Here's a Darksiders-esque axe. Open to critique on the texture! Diffuse only
Nice work, I'm unsure about the noise detail.. It makes it look as if it has an infection of some sort.. I'd start painting a diffuse now and then add in noise after.
I'd suggest showing off the wires differently. Right now it's a warbly mess of lines. Perhaps a flat diffuse only with black lines, or a cay render with black lines?
The face sculpt is done for the most part. The beard will still be changed quite a lot, and I will be painting normal/bump/diffuse map using Mari (XYZ Textures workflow). :)
Dont just change the background, it wont help much if the rest stays as it is. Try to load a light rig with a more diffused setup. Shapes shading to black = never :P
metal is too diverse to be textured in one way, personally i start with photo refs, but often dim the detail in the diffuse and let the reflection/spec map do the work