I finally found some time to finish a render (which is a rare thing, hehe). Hope you like it, I tried to make a dwarf based on the dwarfes of Blizzards Warcraft series.
First time I seriously used Blender’s new sculpt mode and I really like it. But I wasn’t able to subdivide the mesh enough to get the desired result, so I additionally made a normalmap with zBrush.
I’m very happy with the beard as I find Blender’s particles hard to control. I’m really lookin’ forward to the particle-recode!
Rendered with Blender internal renderer +AO
First off, nice work. :] I like that guy, and the execution of the model is clean and crisp.
Now, secondly: I know as an idea this might kinda suck, but blender has decent 3d-space image painting tools now, so if you unwrapped the model, you could probably just attach an image to it and paint the bump map on in there. The only real thing is that you have to have the texture size a multiple of two or else it’s really slow, but if it is, in fact, a multiple of two, it runs like a dream.
)