I'll continue my crits here, in response, then wait for a WIP.

-Can I see a wireframe of the lo-poly model?
-Use references, or be prepared to write up a logic, history, and explanation for how it got that way. If your Ogre is living in an earthlike environment, use references, it'll end up saving you work and looking better. If you were doing a martian type creature, you'd get something believable by really making up a history for him. You'll be able to tell the good character designs from the bad character designs this way. A good character designer can rattle off for an hour about this character, and their character will be extremely believable, even if extremely stylized. However, a bad character designer won't even come up with a personal names or name for the species, where he lives, what he eats, etc., in a detailed sense, and his character will be full of design inefficiencies and contradictions. Its a pretty typical ogre, so it looks OK, but figure out what type of ogre he is, does he live in a cave or in a swamp or in a forest, what does he eat, who are his predators and who are his prey. Yes, alot of work and design, but your character will be infinitely better for it. You can figure out things such as jewelry to what muscles should be more defined by it.
-You won't lose the silhouette with another role of fat. You'll help it. If the silhouette isn't anatomically correct, it'll look strange, strong or not.
-In the face, I'm looking specifically at the laughlines/nasalbursomethingorother furrow. Also realize how normal maps will deform. You can't (easily) do things like add in laughlines and wrinkles when the face deforms, you need to use geometry to do this. Look at HL2. Alyx's face has IIRC about 3000+ polygons (the character is over 8000 polies). That's how they get such good facial deformation, and things like laughlines when she smiles. So you may have to work those things into the normal map if you want them to be there without excessive geometry. Again, look at reference: humans, bulldogs, monkeys, pigs, anything with a similarity.
-Lastly, watch out for things like the vein on the back of his neck. That's a basic ZBrush alpha brush anyone can spot from a mile away. For things like veins, your better off using a normal round brush on a very high-res version with Projection Master, which will give you better control over where his veins are.
-Overall, he lacks some specificity because you just need more reference. You seem to be learning ZBrush well though. It is a great tool.

Quote:Original post by Sand



Here is the hand made head.

how many polys is the model so far? look pretty good.

You can optimize the head bigtime. Just go around collapsing edges and see what you can get away with (and fix the teeth, bigtime). Its interesting you are saying its pelt mapped so its optimized to run in a game engine, but yet the poly count is way higher than neccessary. Basics first, my friend.

You misunderstood what I meant. I meant your model is inefficient, not too high poly. Polies are fine, as long as they are efficient. But there are numerous instances on the head (especially the chin, forehead) that can be optimized. A good model and bad model are different because the amount of polies, they are different because bad models aren't efficient.
Just like you clean up code after you work on it, so it doesn't repeat procedures and do the same thing twice, you optimize a model so you get all you can out of every polygon. If you feel like because of larger poly limits, you don't have to be wise and efficient with polygons, your never going to get an art job. Its a reality of the industry, and of everything one does. If you slack and say 'who's gonna care anyway,' you're not doing your job good enough, and for someone seeking work, who must show that he's better than people already in the industry (which is why its difficult to break in as an artist), its unacceptable.

Red are edge loops you should try deleting.
Blue are areas that need to be cleaned up.
You can use triangles, especially in places that don't deform. That's the only way to make a game-efficient head. You can't continue the front-of-nose edges around the back of the head, you close them off before the hairline. You don't continue the bottom-of-lip edges down the neck (unless the larynx is very important), you close them off. And the only reason you'd want those cheek polygons so close is to make a crease, but to make a good crease you're generally going to need more polys than that. Its important, especially when you're learning, that you DO go over your model, like a chess-game, or else you're never going to learn how to make a good model, you'll only know what a good model looks like, not how to get there/an easier way to get there than you took.