The black gouroud shading is taking away from the style. If you can get some more saturated shadows, it would look nicer. Some kind of toon shader, but with soft transitions maybe?
the indent above his upper lip is way too soft, in the two reference pics it's really pronounced, especially straight above the upper lip which gives the lip itself a hard edge
nice modelling dude. my only crit would be the edges could be a bit tighter, at the mo i think its slightly too soft. tightening it would give it a more realistic feel.
definately recognisable man, looks a little rigid at the mo- it might be worth soft-select dragging a bit of posture into him. even a bind pose can have a bit of flex in it. like it though
In Max I did it with "Normal theft" script from scriptspot. Not sure maybe they did something in the soft itself now. Blender has super cool perfectly working data transfer modifier that can do it on the fly .
helluva a lot better than my first character. you can smooth out those boots by using mesh display > soft/harden edges. a high value but less than 90 should do the trick.
I've been listening to a few of The Avalanches mixes, like this: [ame=" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u8dPN0M5dk"]The Avalanches - Soca! Sirens! Brains! - 'Brains' Party @ St Jeromes (2005) Full Length Mix - YouTube[/ame]
I tend to go by the sharpness of the edge. If it's a pretty sharp edge (and generally only if the bake is rendering strange) then I'll bevel it, otherwise I just leave it soft. There aren't hard-and-fast rules about this sort of thing.
The first three were modeled in Max, soft edges coming from Mental Ray's rounded corners. The 5-7 and the M4 I'm using nDo2 for which is a bit faster but doesn't have quite as much control.
Seconding the modeling technique - I make a cone and then duplicate it a bunch, use soft selection or a lattice to modify the objects as a group. There aren't that many individual eyelashes, so placing them didn't seem like that big a deal.