I’m looking for feedback on this. Any critique is appreciated. Cheers!
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First off nice work, I’m no professional yet but here is some feedback on what I’m seeing can be improved on.
The Good: Your proportions on the character are looking good, silhouette reads very well and anatomically speaking nothings standing out as incorrect.
What can improve: The suite or body of her is very busy a lot of lines going all over the place. Think about simplifying the design. Consider picking major areas to keep the detail such as on the shoulders, wrist, and hips. You can also think about breaking up the symmetry a bit by adding more skin, if you wanted to keep all cyber then you could add variety that effect the silhouette.
Here is a quick paint over to show you what I mean. Hope this helps 
How did you create those lines. I am a newbie.
Thanks, Nelson. I really appreciate your comments. It’s good to hear that the anatomy is sound, as that is the most important thing to me. I think you’re right that the design might benefit from being a bit more asymmetrical, but this is supposed to be a plugsuit for mecha interface, so that’s why it looks the way it does. I think the best point you made was that I’ve packed detail everywhere horror vacui instead of focusing on areas that make sense. I’m definitely going to work on the shoulders and legs, and try to scale back some of the other details. Thanks again for your critique.
Cheers!
-Austin
I’m not so sure asymmetry or simplification are necessarily improvements. That said, I personally like designs with fewer lines – makes them look sleek and high-tech to me.
Here’s an example of asymmetrical complexity, and here’s one for symmetrical simplicity.
Yes, they’re both from the Pixologic Mass Effect 3 interview, so if you’ve got them stored on your hard drive somewhere, forget the links and know that they’re the turnarounds for Liara and Edi, respectively.
In any event, my main beef with your piece is the hair: From a distance it looks acceptable, but the close-up shows how much of a mess it really is. In the book Zbrush: Professional Tips and Techniques (Amazon.com link, but it’s written by Pixologic’s own Paul Gaboury and still chock-full of info even if it deals with version 4R2), artist Micheal Defeo outlines a technique to get hair strands from a sculpted mass.
Hint: Make a sculpted hair mass (start with a sphere, use Move, Claybuildup or whatever and make fairly broad details), use masking to draw out strand lines and then Extract them into new subtools. Do this repeatedly until you have enough hair strands to suit you (don’t forget you’re still keeping a sculpted mass for the body of the hair, so you don’t have to go nuts). Use Move Topological to position the strands how you want, and Smooth to taper the ends. Polypaint on the head to draw the roots along the hairline completes the illusion.
If you’d rather have an explanation that uses Fibermesh and plenty of images, check this forum post. It’s by Joseph Drust, the guy who did those helmet design tutorials recently, so you know it’s gotta be good.
Hopefully this information will help you make awesome hair for this figure (and all your figures in the future).
Thanks, Monkey. Hair is always challenging. I’ve gotten better at it, but you’re right that it still needs work. I’ve been using the CurveTubeSnap brush to draw individual strands of hair, then smoothing the ends and inflating in the middle. Funny story: I actually have that book you mentioned by Paul Gaboury… I won it in a contest, along with a ZBrush keychain when he came to my school. The contest was to answer simple questions in exchange for loot. He asked the audience, “who wrote this book?” and I blurted out, “YOU DID!” and then he gave it to me.
Renegade,
The brush I used to carve the lines is called, “falloff_bell_narrow” by Bryan Silva and you can find it here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?48121-Bryan-Silva-s-Brushes
thanks for the link
You’re welcome! But beware: the act of carving those lines is extremely addictive… once you start, it’s very hard to stop.
I really like it, definateley looks like a mecha pilot suit to me, the only thing I think is slightly off is the length of the legs, or maybe you wanted it that way? just she looks a bit lanky :), overall though I think it’s really good, are you gonna do a mecha to go along with this?