This is really good work! At least on par with some of the better stuff I've seen on BlenderArtists. Rendering 3 million hairs... on my own computer, Blender can barely handle 3,000 in any reasonable amount of time, and certainly not at that resolution. I'm learning Blender and 3D graphics myself, so I can really appreciate how much work went into this (and I can sympathize about weight painting; personally, I prefer to assign vertices to groups manually rather than use a brush, it gives you much more control as long as the number of vertices is mentally manageable).

I look forward to seeing more of this.

Thanks!

I'm not a big forum-goer; there's a poor signal-to-noise ratio, mostly people complaining about missing features or asking questions that are answered by basic FAQs or a little practice. It's not really a "learning experience" imho unless you're in the gallery section and they choose to post BLENDs. Also I spend the whole time thinking "I should be practicing!"

2.5 is much more efficient. And with more practice you learn where you need to apply detail and where you can cut corners. But regardless, this render barely functions with 8GB RAM, and I'm going to upgrade to 12 this weekend so I can use the computer while rendering animation.

My last dude had 105 vert groups. A lot of those were auto-built by Blender, but those aren't nearly good enough for high-performance cases like face morphs or HD animation, so a lot of them were hand-retouched. This posing here is actually entirely done with envelopes because I was raging at weight painting, but I'm gonna break out my tablet for doing sensitive areas like jaw, shoulder, etc.

I need to get better with several subjects before I'll feel comfortable putting a lot of this stuff up on forum galleries. I have a high bar for my own work and I need to overcome anti-fur bias (not that I'm going to be posting murrpurr on mainstream sites.)

There'll be much more, slowly, Seth willing. I hope he doesn't have many quibbles about what I want to do with him, considering the reference image had a lot of ... fluids.

Really very rad . . . and strangely artsy. Great work . . . I do no rendering of my own, so I have no tips or anything but from a person who has no experience, it looks gurr-ate!

excellent

Thanks baby.
Have you gotten any shit about Daz because of the TOS changes, or is it smooth sailing?

I survive each year, haven't really caught hell, but 3 years ago I gave it. They pretty much leave me alone. I take the cookie cutter models as they call them and do some modding so they don't look like the out of the box models. =)

3 million in one pass? Wow.

Yes, weight painting blows.

/flex
pro-grade tools .... trying to make up for lack of practice since 2009

I like that BUTT
And from a less primal standpoint, that's pretty fair anatomy, I really like the robotic legs, and that's one sweet render.
Think the face might benefit from more stylization to avoid the uncanny valley effect, though.

Haha thanks a ton! After all this practice, it's reassuring to know that I'm starting to get things right once in a while.

Working in 3D, where I have to build on a physically-possible maquette, makes some 2D tricks impossible, like I don't get the softness of paint without overbearing post-pro, it's more obvious if I distort a feature to make it more pleasing from a certain angle, I don't get ink to direct attention, etc. Now that I've got a modicum of anatomy down, uncanny valley might be my worst enemy and what I have to study on next. I've tried to make every character as large-eyed as possible, going for something in the vein of Abe Sapien / animufurry, but during refinement, inevitably tweaking the eyes towards a more human-accurate size was always a noticeable improvement. "Do humans first!" they told me ... I need more practice.

Over-rendered 2D CG anthros irk me a little, so at some point this might not be exactly my style. But in terms of personal progression I'm jump-around-the-room happy with it.

I definitely recommend looking at hi-poly Square Enix models for reference on stylistic approaches to 3D rendered characters. As much as people might express disdain for their "animeish" approach to character design, I have simply never seen an ugly-looking Square Enix model, and they have flavor from many different species, ethnicities and cultures (if their attempts at race are just a little bland).
Whether they can make a good game anymore is irrelevant :)
And you wouldn't do wrong looking at Blizzard's prerendered cinematics, and even some of their in-game ones.

There's plenty of other studios that do more "cartoonlike" characters, but gathering from your work, I wasn't sure that was the aesthetic you wanted to go for.

Thanks, I'll check up on those. I don't feel like I've found my style yet - though my biggest worry is that everything that I sculpt from now on will have sameface because I found one thing that works. Everything that I've done 'till now has just been trying to get it to work, visually, to not look awful because of a lack of knowledge of anatomy or CG lighting or whatnot. Now that I sort of have a handle on creating something that doesn't look frightful, I have a meaningful base to learn how to better differentiate stylized from ultra-realistic from toony. In my study I've always tried to keep perspective and diversity between realistic and toony, and creating vs implementing others' designs. e.g. my gallery: realistic strype, toony bonk, realistic OC, stylized onta, stylized OC, etc. I can see how Squeenix character design could teach me a lot about balancing real anatomy vs tooned out caricature in 3D, and really, now that I think about it, that makes a lot more sense than what I did, starting off studying by translating 2D characters. I guess I'm just anthro-obsessed, and there are sooooo few 3D role models in here.

All good points! I'll think about whether I can think of any other more "balanced" furry models, but you're right. Outside of, well, Star Fox, there really aren't too many examples of a more serious approach to anthropomorphism.

Which is something I am looking very much forward to changing >:3