Hi all. I've started to feel a bit wierd about this. Almost like after the opening few weeks, I've started to look at what Im doing/have done, differently. I cant tell whether I like it or not.

In this, I hope I am right in saying that I have managed to bring out some more of the detail around the hand area. The elbow is a mess, and some of the lines across his upper chest area have always bugged me, so I plan on having another session in ZBrush where to try and smooth out those areas.

I dont like his mouth. His mouth and his face. Something about them is bothering me. I made some gums for him, which I completely forgot about, and the teeth in this image were rendered seperate and then pasted in, so when I redo the zbrush, I will render him anew with teeth and gums included which should make them look a little more like they belong there.

Im also considering whether to open his right eye up. I guess it was supposed to look like he'd lost his eye or something, but I just think theres not enough interest in that part of the image. Im thinking about cutting some of the polys there and replacing with a sphere which I can use to create an eye. Or perhaps I could even build some robotic/terminator style metallic bits to overlay any dodgy areas.

I do still plan on making him a left arm also.

Most importantly for me, theres something about his skin I dont like. I think it's a combination of Dave's view that there is just a lck of finer detail, skin pores, etc, and the shader. I have a sub surface scattering shader on him, which I have left at just the default settings. But theres a hardness to his skin still. Almost like, a lack of ambient occlusiony-ness. I have tried an Ao render and putting this into the mix but it doesnt quite work how I want. Perhaps its the specular highlighting thats too hard. I may play with the shader when I make that last push to correct some of the detail/smoothing issues.

I had thought about extending the image up so I could make some kind of city background, but when experimenting with this, it really blew the composition, and the top of the frame really does look best, in terms of him, where it is, just above his head, I think.

This is the overall look I think I am settling on. But with these above changes to make/add. When I have done them, I shall see how I feel, and, with so much time remaining, perhaps I will start something else.

This being the first challenge here, or elsewhere, I have tried, its been good that the deadline is far off, because, where typically, I probably would have moved on, or settled for less, the deadline makes you really push on and fix or try to improve things that otherwise I might not have.