I'd concentrate on removing the expression from his face. If you sculpt him with a pouty face you'll have a hard time getting other expressions out of him once he is rigged and animated. I know it can be hard to do with a celebrity like Charlie that does a lot of pouty face, but it is rather important. I agree with the…
it's really hard to say tbh. the sky is the limit with pre-rendered images. you'll want to look at 3d scanning a live model to base your character on. you will need a full character model with rig and skin and facial expressions to create poses from and a workflow for this project to create the outfit variations and adapt…
You might want to look into Jason Osipa's Stop Staring book. It explains pretty much everything from topology to shape and rig creation and comes with a bunch of example files and a useful Maya shelf. I recommend you grab some of the files to see how the shapes are set up. Here is an explanation of topology for animation.…
@Rocket Brian Thanks man! Since my last post, I made more changes to my topology in other areas as well! The reason for the single edge loop is how WoW models their characters. Having those big stocky pauldrons cover up majority of the character's shoulder, and possibly for how they have separate UV's for many textures, I…
Rendering normal maps is very interesting and I found out a really neat way to do it. It worked very well with the vegetation in this project. This is something that I want to try IRL :) The way it worked was using red, green and blue lights and a material that has white diffuse color. I placed the negative version of the…
I too have been wishing for AO/Cavity map baking/output from Painter, currently when I'm done with Painter I have to rig up something in Designer with all my Painter inputs every time. Looking forward to finish up everything in one go in Painter. Froyok, I noticed the Baker idea on uservoice has half the comments including…
@callebo: Thanks for the crit, I will try adding the fur patches in. Originally I took them out as the art style I was going for was quite minimalist. I did give it a go a few bear designs ago and I couldn't really get them looking right :P @Sweetangel0467: I'm thinking of including the second from last design I did as…
If you want to use the same animation set, consider ways to suppress certain portions of the animation. 1st person in games is normally simulated and doesn't represent a real 1st person view - so plugging in third person stuff directly to first usually yields some not so desirable results. The same goes for prioritizing…
Assuming you aren't going to render him with fur... I think you should try to imitate the "noisy" texture the fur generates with the colors. For example the black lines in the Concept Art aren't smooth and crisp as yours currently are. So instead of drawing a single line/stroke, draw a bunch of black lines to show the…
No perspective I use Pure ref and have zillions of anatomical references that I look through, but I don't try to copy an image I see, my model is bent in joint areas a bit differently I don't want my base mesh anatomy model to be an exact copy of somebody elses to be honest, but I think I could just copy. I'm going to use…