Awesome! You could maybe mix secondary reflections - newton's rings look cool on carapace-like parts and a secondary Blinn for others to get a coated, chitin-shell like layer.
Thanks for the crit, guys. And I agree with you Livewire, the inside of that shell was too clean. I added some stuff to it but am curious if it's too busy now or headed in the right direction?
Thanks, Repete! The layers both technique seems to confine me within other UV shells (???) and therefore dont do quite what I need. Was I doing something wrong?
If you want just an outline, why not duplicate the mesh and add a black material, add a shell modifier to it, and invert the normals? I think that's a very easy / common way to add outlines.
@PyrZern: Nice progress, are you going for the shell method for fur? @iadagraca: Great finish. -- I'm mostly done on the texturing. I'll be moving into pose and maybe environment. I'm not sure yet.
Can you show your normalmap, and your model, without the normalmap applied? Maybe you don't have Uv splits and padding between the UV shells, where the smoothing splits are.
Thanks for the comments guys. These aren't for a game, just practicing. Gazu, no secret trick really, just splitting UV shells and smoothing groups if the shading gets too extreme. Next one -
Also realized that one reason could be that you haven't cut your UV-shell in a manner which Maya can handle unwrapping. But I'm guessing you already know about this.
your uv shell's texel density is to low would be my bet. add more map's for those items maybe or look at using micro normal detail in your engine of choice.
I never used Max only Maya but looks like automatic unwrap. You must connect those parts into more simple shells. I recommend overlap or mirror geometry.