Hi guys, I’m attempting to learn character modeling and I am quickly coming to understand how very difficult achieving realism is. I’ve been struggling to take this model to the next level, tweaking textures and pushing the wireframe around. How can I help this character to feel more alive? I’d love to have some fresh eyes take a look at it and let me know what stands or what you would change. Cheers!
Combined:
Clay:
Wireframe:
It’s nice but the ear looks odd
Hi Kit,
A little observation from me… I am still a bit confused on the gender of this character, I think it works more as a female then a male because… the chin is narrow and pointy, but then she has a deep brow… I not sure how to descibe it so I draw in the picture.
The structure for the lips, nose and ear can also improves a bit.
Hope it’s not confusing… let me know if it does… hope it helps, Cheers!
Thanks @miica for the very detailed feedback. I’ll definitely rethink the ear. I brought down the brow and that made a huge difference. The ear was also too far back and too large. Now I think the textures are more of an issue than the geometry, especially around the eyes and mouth.
It’s looking quite nice! The lighting and texture looks pretty good to me.
but I can’t help to make a little more remarks, the skins has some dark areas that might be caused by texture or mesh shadow, I am not sure, but I highlight it in the picture below.
The eyes might be a bit bright, or maybe it’s because of the eyelash is too dark, it makes the eye white and eyelashes black contrasty, maybe you can adjust both of them to make the color look more harmonious with the skin around it…
You might also want to add some bump texture to the lips to breakup the highlights and add some details.
The hair in front also has some obvious intersection, I am not familiar with Blender’s hair… I just started learning recently, but maybe you can add more strands or break down that area to more hairs and do more adjustment so they don’t intersect.
The nose hole there still doesn’t looks natural…
Sorry if those are a mouthful, but those are what I would tackle if I am working on this model, don’t take it seriously, just some ideas 
hope they helps… Cheers!
Hey! I know I’m a bit late to the party, but my biggest suggestion would be to seperate paint a skin later and a subdermal later, or the SSS layer if that makes sence. You need to be able to define the underlying muscle color and stuff yano.
This also helps because it lets you controller how much that effect shows through. For example, make the ears very red on the subdermal layer so that it will show through a bit more red, but make the forehead closer to the skin tone, to show that it’s less subsurfacescattery.
So yeah, I’d say paint the base skin tone and SSS layer seperately.
Thanks again @miica for the detailed feedback. I’ve made a lot of changes to both the geometry and the shaders as well as implementing 3 point lighting, which helped a lot. As you can see her hair has gone pink! The eyes continue to be the most difficult area to get believable geometry. The eyelashes are also giving me troubles. They’re currently planes but I might change them to use a hair system.
Combined:
Clay:
Wireframe:
By the way if you guys are curious about styling hair particles you should check out this video, I learned a lot from it.
thank you so much!!
Not my video BTW, just sharing something I learned from 
I used a skull I modeled from another project and a glass shader to put together a little animation.
