Latest update:
Progress
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Raluca got cancelled. The concept turned out to be way more cartoony than I anticipated.
After a year long hiatus, let’s see how far I can take it this time before I quit.
You are off to a good start. I don’t see why you couldn’t finish this. I don’t have much to critique at the moment as the proportions look alright to me.
It indeed turned out to be too big of a project. I’ll continue to update base meshes but I’ll also start building an online WebGL real-time 3D sandbox where I’d like to have the characters fully controllable.
I’ll be finishing the characters one at a time now, because each of them is taking so long. And I don’t hope to finish all of them in less than a year.
Feel free to inspect the blendand tell me what to improve.
There’s a lot of detail missing, as well as sculpting and all the other stuff.
But now I’ll probably quickly rig the characters and try to have the base meshes inside of the web app, once it exists, and then continue to update the models when there’s a time to do so.
I really like it, nice work,
Imagining this as doing my maths homework, the more I solve, the more professional, better I become at maths,
Keep going, my man, keep going! :–)
They’re really nice. I’d love to see what you do with them. I think they look great as they are, though. Even with limited detail there are a lot of applications for models like these.
Thanks a lot guys. Let’s all stay motivated and get better at Blender / Maths. 
I definitely see their potential, it’s all about time constraints. At the very least I’d like for each of them to have a very short introduction video. (around 1 minute in duration)
Also, if they end up looking good enough I thought of selling them somewhere.
All characters got a final stylization pass.
They’re mostly a bit thinner, colors have changed slightly, and all the contours should be more fun to look at.
I also did some work on the bags
Now I’ll finally get to sculpting, begin work on faces and hair meshes. Faces especially will take a looong time though, and might be where I get stuck in this project. We’ll see.
These are really great! Before you add more details – I actually like the generic look. It would be great for creating clipart type characters to use in various projects that I’m involved in.
Thanks for seeing some potential this early. The fun stuff (faces, textures, physics…) are still to come.
In a perfect case, I’d like to get something along the lines of Fortnite. Nothing realistic, keeping it very simple and cartoony.
Of course that’s not easy.
But I’ll be happy to share everything I make, especially if you were to build on the characters and do something interesting with them.
Ooooo – I love the way the Fortnite characters look! You have a very nice style for these already so I can’t wait to see what you come up with. Thanks.
Here’s my first attempt at faces. I was confident enough with the bodies to not ask for feedback, but with faces I can’t bypass this stage.
Feel free to download the blend and tell me what to improve, what you think are the most obvious things I missed. I’m prepared to scrap these and start all over again.
I’m not going for 1:1 realistic sculpt, it would just be nice to get some of the models’ features. As I mentioned, texturing should be fairly stylized. But anything can change at this point. Any feedback is highly appreciated. Thanks.
Hello! since you ask so nicely hehe, Well I think you should go with the references of the girl on top, she has a nice relaxed mouth that you can try to replicate. now you have to start thinking in the references more in a scientific way first. you need front, side 3/4 views in a relax way, then you can more in diferent lights and more from the top or up view.
Now, you have to study the planes of the head, and the human proportions, andrew loomis has nice things. also check this page
Also you have to work hard in your observational skills, try not to trace on images when you are studying, other wise you will not learn much.
Check Adam Fisherfor inspiration
For planing the sculpt just take steps:
first primary forms like the skull, the ears, the nose, the eyes, the mouth, just shape, not detail, just distances, and volumnes, something rught with as litle poligons as posible, that way you can easyly and without pain change almos everything, ones you have the form the way you like go to step two:
Secondary forms, now take the individual parts and refine them, the nose, the lips, the eye, the ear, with more poligons, but not too much, in this step you may want also to change proportions, becouse you can see that something went wrong. in this step you have to achive all you want to determine the character. here will be the perfect time to do retopology.
In this point you may think in break the symmetry.
Terciary forms: just work in the wrinkles, and skin details.
So, as you can see I did not tell you anything about the heads that you already sculpt, but you don’t need that, if you try what I tell you here, you will see a lot yourself. Keep going! good luck!
Just a little update so the thread doesn’t get locked up.
I worked a lot on the faces. Surprisingly, ditching dyntopo sculpting and getting a low-poly base mesh with proper topology helped me immensely. They’re so much nicer to look at than the first iteration. 
I experimented with more cartoony styles, but they looked terribly with the bodies I already modeled.So I think this is about the direction I’d like to go.
Still needs some work though. The beautiful train station hdri was taken from HDRI heaven.
Experimenting…
Coming together. I’m pretty scared that something will look off in the when everything’s done. I suppose it’s almost unavoidable the first time.
Nothing is final and I’m really not looking forward to making the hair, but I’m moving forward…
If anyone wanted to inspect the blend and tell me what you think feels off, I’d be happy to get some feedback.
So I’ve done some baking and this is the result.
I’m combining ao, cavity and dot product shading to get some additional shading for real-time applications, where you’ll be able to change the clothes’ color in real time.
The baked textures need some tweaking though. The normals on the arms especially look very strange.
For rendering I’m going with the principled shader, even though in real-time applications I’ll be using old-school Lambert shading. Here I tested different specular / sheen values.
Regarding Cycles:
I’m new to cycles and I’m struggling a bit. I don’t know why getting ambient occlusion is so difficult. I can only get multiplicative AO via compositing. Isn’t there a better way to do it? In BI you just hit a button and there you go.
And the skin SSS in the principled shader is really confusing. I had to use an SSS value of 0.01? Why so small? Any bigger than that and the whole model is translucent
Little update.
I’d really appreciate some feedback here. Focusing on the model geometry, I’m wondering:
I’m afraid I might be missing these obvious things because I spent so much time looking at her.
I’m willing to give the blend file to anyone who asks for it…
She’s cute !
Nice job. 
Nice, work in this thread!
The face is almost not uncanny enough compared to cartoony style : last picture reveals that the most interesting characterization only appears in ortho view, which is rarely used in story telling, so She is too close to real life for my taste and her Keira Knightley like angular jaw line could be more accentuated so as to appear in all optics.
Her eyes should be more divergent, otherwise it will always look like she is squinting at an object only a few centimeters away from her face
@The3DLioness Thanks a lot…
@Maurice_Raybaud Thank you so much for feedback.
I’ll definitely try to make her more stylized. I agree that the ortho view reveals some interesting opportunities. With the jaw, it feels like I’m pushing it as is, any more and it starts to look very masculine.
I do struggle with the eyes. They need to be really big so that they’re flat enough, but the bigger the eyes, the closer they need to be together to fit inside the head.
I noticed that disney characters have similar thing going on, but It’s not that distracting in their case. I also suspect disney faces don’t have spherical eyes at all, but rather a custom shape to fill out the eyesockets properly.
I’ll do my best to address these and post an update.
