current progress
I was doodling and came up with this guy. Base mesh done in blender, going to export to maya for a nice mental ray render, yay university license!! but yeah right now I’m gearing up to paint the textures for this guy in zbrush. don’t really know how to go about that…but I’ll figure it out 
zbrush pics:
actually I’ll give blender a shot as well. see what the internal can do with it, displacement wise
and everything from UVs to multiple basemesh adjustments were done in blender as well 
I use it as one would use Modo I guess
What a handsome fellow
What a handsome fellow
haha true. The bump is a bit strong but im anticipating the SSS with knock down a lot of the definition.
Pretty Cool, I like it 
more people should comment… Keep up the awesomeness
trying to get the displacement to look right with SSS
I like the detailing on the model.
It’s difficult to tell at the moment but his skin pores look a bit big and under the SSS give his skin more of an orange peel texture.
Anyone else think this looks like Patrick Stuart?
a little update
Do you have a green lamp in the scene?
The black eye do look creepy
did some more tests. created more maps.
I thinks I like the skin now. and the eyes are a wip. Also adjusted the mesh
warmed up the skin
The lighting is just terrible it makes him look sick.
He would probably look more human with some eyebrows.
I agree with the lighting. Its one of my weak points. any ideas? and eyebrows are in the future my friend
Why so serious? 
great work thus far but I think his ears could do with some love and attention in the way of modeling
It would probably look much better by just switching places of the lights.
I like to use sun lamps. One shining slightly from above/front with a hint of yellow, then three light blue sun lamps shining horizontally in the directions that the yellow lamp don’t shine. I deselect “ray shadow” on the blue lamps and set their energy to about 0.25.
I’m still working on those eyes…
and now notes on blender:
Using Blender as an aid to other programs I find very useful. The built in compositor is a god send as well. Maya and Blender have been playing nicey nice so far. Its doesn’t seem to be any bumps. I can still model in blender so much faster than in maya, and find its controls to be very intuitive (I also hope that the maya interface will crash and burn in a fiery death). I’ve used maya basically as a way to communicate with mental ray, but im about to explore the possibilities of maya hair. I’m also going to use the same maps for this mesh on a blender internal scene and compare the two in upcoming posts.
