Thank you for the suggestions. I really have to study more on surface imperfections. The lightning I tried to replicate the position IRL, but you are right and I completely missed that all the shadows are very soft without a single sharp one. I'll have to toy around with them. Thanks again!
IIRC 1 unit in UDK = 1 unit in softimage (roughly 2cm). Character height is normally around 96units, although there's some variations on this, in Gears of War I believe they use 120units. Just make a box at 96units and see how it looks ingame, will give you a decent starting point.
Love the design. You've done a good job translating it 3d. My one thought is that the segmented portions of the alligator could use some cleaner lines. On the tail, I'd be inclined to keep the segments somewhat uniform and use the hinging to get that nice arc, rather than actually bending is around.
The stupid direction cubemaps is a feature of stingray pbs and behaves the same in both max and maya iirc - you can't do anything about it as it's all locked up in the material node. The new Shader is a built from scratch ShaderFX material so I can do whatever I want.
Did a little PO if you don't mind. I moved the iris out very slightly and reduced the red to inside of the eyeball...this balanced out the position. I moved the eyebrows down slightly as they looked a bit too high. I also shaped the lips to be more feminine. Just suggestions!
Draw IRL objects (including animals and people) from direct observation on a daily basis. When you feel comfortable drawing pretty much anything you see (which will happen eventually, because you'll be practicing a lot), cookie monster will present no challenge to you. It'll be awesome, try it.
Wow! This looks great! The whole thing is very characteristic of Darius, however his iris' are a bit distracting (not in the good way haha). They seem too bright and flat and stand out way too much because of that. Keep it up though, this looks like it's gunna turn out awesome :D
IIRC one of the later builds of UDK from last year added material functions. some of them are node based reconstructions of the photoshop layer blend modes, and various filters. it sounds like what vurtousic was looking for is already availible in stock UDK through one material function node.
i'm not sure which build you are on, but iirc the freesdk supports a blendmap just as well as vertex colors for the blend shader. Might be a lot easier to use. Thanks for following up with your solution though on the color-set editor - i know a few people who ran into similar problems with it! :)
Perhaps that Arc the Lad collection, it had an interesting battle system that combined turn based grid combat with timed action commands, it's a shame no one played it though. Also the Paper Mario series is rather innovative, with each new title it seems as though the paper aspect of the series gets tinkered with.