One last try at Z-Brush

After the last two days things have been quite disastrous and I'm gutted that things have not turned out the way i planned. I decided today that i would have one last go at the torso area using the stencil technique that i tried with the characters face yesterday. Before i started sculpting again in Z-Brush. I took some images into Illustrator and created my own stencils like these images below:

These would be place in the Alpha and act as a mask with black area being unaffected and white ares could be extruded upwards. With this in place i attempted again to create the panels and below is the result:

As you can probably see there is a big improvement in the straight line edges and there is alot more definition to the panels now. Since i was happy with the panels i started to poly paint over the model in Z-Brush to start to bring out the panels alot more.

I thought that i was getting somewhere and i showed my work to both Dean and John to get some feedback. They both came to the same conclusion that i had put way too many panels in and added too much detail. They explained to me that if you was to look at the character from a distance that the panels would become all blurred and the user would not be able to make everything out. They said that i should go back and make the panels alot bigger in size so it was more pleasing on the eye. So with this in mind i would have to start all over again :(