Hey zeph,
first of all: for your first sculpt I think this is pretty good! I started sculpting not to long ago and my first drafts were just terrible. For me the only way to improve, and I guess thats not to much of a surprise was to do it over and over again until I had done something that was close to what I had in mind.
I sculpted this straight out of whatever my mind can think of
But I guess thats the most important thing to understand: What you have in mind isn’t allways as precise as you think. More often it’s vague and you have to guess here and there. The result is that you have to do a lot of corrections and you are loosing a lot of time. So the best thing you can do is to feed your mind with as much references as possible. An I think you already got a thon of sources to get them from: So look up Images of Tron:Legacy, MassEfeckt but don’t stop there: Maybe the original Tron movie has something to offer for you or there are more sources for inspiration regaring space suits like this. I for example had to directly had to think of samus aran of the metroid series. Then try to find our witch parts of your references you like the most and keep them as an image to come back to while you sculpt. If something comes to your mind you can still make changes (so it’s not that you loose all your creative thinking that way). But it’s a good way to not get lost.
Also the first thing about your figure that i recognized was that it seams a bit flat from side view! Find some references for anatomy as well so you can get the curves right. In the long run I guess (as a sculpor of characters or creatures) one can not study anatomy enough.
I started off with a multi-res modifier which was kind of my mistake because I feel Dynamic Topology is much better in the sense that my mesh won’t get too dense fast. It eventually got to 2 million tris where my computer started to choke so I had to decimate a bit.
I would not dismiss the multires modifire entirely. It’s a nice tool to nondestructively edit the overall shape and go step by step to more detail. Thats something one should do in dynatop as well. But if you have limited hardware, try to start with a really basic base mesh that only articulates the basic proportiones, use the multyres modifier for two, maybe three levels of subdivisions and then move on to dynamic topology. But thats personal preference. You can use dynatopo right away of course!
I left some details out on the helmet cause using dyntopo would destroy some of its edges.
If someone could also recommend the brushes I should and shouldn’t use that would be nice as well.
I have seen some peaple on youtube using dynamic topology sculpting for hard surfaces like the helmet in your case. Here’s a link to the first video of that kind I could find:
He uses mainly the crease and flatten brushes to maintain the appearence of a metal surface. Also pay attention to the way he configures the curve of his brushes: Making a very sharp and uniform crease. He also uses a curve tool I find very interesting. I never used it but it looks like something you could try.
So, again really nice start! i guess if you keep practicing you will make huge steps. I know I wrote a lot but I hop it’s still helpful.
Have a nice day and have fun sculpting!
Aaron