not to be nitpicky, but one thing i noticed is that nearly all your cylinders have the same amount of vertices, you could get a visually more pleasing result by redistributing some of them to the silhouette of your object
We also have a good amount of info here on our wiki, http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Category:Character It's worth digging around a little bit. You'll find gems like this: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Roguedevelopmentdiary
It's fairly nice actually. quite simplified. no ads, no limit to the amount of text you can type, so you can paste an article or go on and on about how so and so is ruining your life again.
The creature creator looks so awesome. I'm pretty impressed they're releasing it next month as a stand-alone, should be fun to mess around in. The amount of quality they get out of procedural stuff is really nice.
Yeah if you've got the extra tesselation there already it can make sense. If you dont, its a huge amount of work, much more so than creating a 2nd uv channel, and doing an auto-unwrap.
You can change your Windows theme without apps such as WinBlinds. I suppose it's not a big deal unless you're low on RAM, but I try to limit the amount of applications I've got running in the background.
I'll take a guess that you're working in too large or small of a scale, or you have geometry intersections very close to a hard edge. Like extruding a face of a cube and scaling it only a very small amount.
i studies art for numerous amount of years, both at home and then went to college, uni did a degree in scientific illustration and then moved on to painting 3d models. another 15 years of that and my work is kind of passable
atom + ion = cheap, consumes not much power and has reasonable amount of power if i was to build up a company, for rendering i either would buy an array of atom dualcores with ion or something completely different
I understand how difficult it would be to put an equal amount of effort into an objective investigation, but realistically, I've never seen that sort of thing done before. It would be interesting as heck to see it done, if you could.