Looking at other artists work and how they detail their characters

Hi John I've been looking at the examples that you sent me and I've posted a couple of them up on here for everyone to see. What I'm not understanding is how detailed do i go in the modelling stage in 3DS Max and when do i stop and let Z-Brush do the work? I'm alittle concerned at the moment as I'm starting to go over budget as my character is already on 11,556 tris. Dean has told me that i can go up to 20,000 tris as this was his tri budget for the characters that he has created. So I'm not entirely sure the correct plan of action John?

Bringing out the Silhouette

After i have conformed to the Unreal Skeleton And meeting up with John a couple of weeks ago he told me that the re-sized character is now fine to be used in Unreal however i needed to add more detail to my character to create a good silhouette. A good silhouette is vital to any character so when implemented into Unreal players will be able to distinguish immediately who the character is. So i have set about added more detail into the character to create a good silhouette. Here is what i produced so far and i have also added the ear to the character:

Having to reshape the character

I have read what John put on the previous post and when i got home from work i decided to have ago at re-shaping my character. I think i know what you mean John in the previous post but i think it would be a good idea to meet up with you tomorrow and discuss it abit more? Anyway i decided to compare my character with the UT3 character that i downloaded and i noticed that my proportions where way off the mark. So as a simple experiment i decided to re-shape all the body parts to more like the UT3 character model and here is the results:



As you can see from the pictures there is a big improvement from the old and new models it isn't perfect i know but at least i can see it now. Am i on the right track here John? What do you think?

All body parts together for the first time

I have worked on the character very hard over the weekend getting all the polys as neat as possible i have worked into the models and created the best edge flows as best i can. I have worked on all body part areas Arms, Torso, Legs, Boots and Head. Although i am not finished yet i wanted to see how my character was shaping up and here are a few screenshots to show how its looking. Current poly count is going OK actually I'm not far off the mark here is the current state of play regarding my Poly count:

Total Polygons = 4640
Total Tris = 9142
Total Verts = 4744

Redesign of the Torso

When i last went to college Dean and Stas were pleased with how my character was coming together, however Stas and Dean pointed out that i should redo the torso as they said it didn't look like it had been modelled, i.e. that i had basically extruded a cylinder and pulled and stretched it to create the required affect. (This was exactly what i had done) So I have gone back to the torso again and Stas told me to start off with a box and shape the torso from there cutting into the box only when required necessary. Below is what i have produced and i have to agree with Stas and Dean it looks alot better.