Yep, those opened edges will cause problems when relaxing the entire thing. It's probably a bit cleaner to relax a selection of verts or faces. Turning on soft select helps when relaxing chunks like that.
Finished up the model, I think I'll go back and do a pass on some of the edges and tighten up the loops a bit in some areas, I think some of the bevels are looking a bit soft.
Suggestion (guess, I'm not the first): Brightness values for each curvature mask stages. Right now it looks like that we are only able to control how Sharp/Fine/Soft/etc propagates/contracts.
Haha I remember watching this movie in art class, and I kept looking at my can of soda, wondering if there was something wrong with it cause the stuff I was seeing was totally warping my brain. Bravo!
After using multiple smoothing groups did you rebake? Soft/hard edges will affect the bake..you want to keep your smoothing groups the same as they were when you baked, generally.
You enabled soft selection: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2017/ENU/3DSMax/files/GUID-BEF2CC1E-40BE-45DD-A8E9-228EE4A1EE98-htm.html
Slowly getting the shapes and forms. Proving quite difficult to perfect the anatomy. Defining the shapes while trying to also keep them a bit soft is proving difficult. Going to move onto the biceps next
Dem soft edges :D Good as always man, love what you have done with that diamond pattern on the grip!(Mind sharing how your workflow on that :) ) Anyways, can't wait for the bake and textures!
Interesting, to say the least. Those girly screams on the other hand... Even if she is meant to be still very young and soft it feels really weird. Or maybe I like overly strong female characters.
Only thing that i can contribute with, is that the particle system lacks intresting shape and definition. They all look kinda soft and round. maybe try to break up the shapes a bit? add some punch into it.