Day 4- "that's one buff old man"

So I have another post of my progress. Reworked some more parts of the chest to make it less wonky (though there's still a few things with the hips that I don't care for but that will get fixed). I moved onto the arms and hands and got those more or less blocked. I'm still fighting with how stylized I want to make this character, but I think that will come out in the texturing process.

I started out like everything else I sculpt, I used the move tool to push and pull the basic forms I wanted. I have very little experience with arms (arm muscles especially) so this part took much longer than it should have and it still isn't totally accurate but it's better than anything else I've tried. I think for future note I should try pulling the arms in at the shoulder more. I've been looking a lot at other sculpts and I've noticed that my sculpt has really broad shoulders and I think that has something to do with the Deltoids protruding from the chest. I sort of did that on purpose just because of baking the mesh but I'm wondering if I did it too much.

Then I had to shape the hand and get the digits in which was a pain in the ass. There wasn't enough geometry in the nubs that were there previously so I had to get dynamesh to work without destroying my model so of course the resolution is rediculous, hopefully the feet wont be as much trouble but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Once I was happy enough with my block-in I went on to doing more anatomy suggestion lines. The upper arm isn't usually too bad, I found some interesting styles for doing the Triceps and I'm pretty happy with the results. Weather or not those are anatomically accurate I'm not 100 on but like I always say, if you don't know if it works, make it look cool. The lower arm was the real difficult part, a lot of the muscles wrap around the arm because their primary use is to move the wrist, so finding reference pics can be difficult because the angle and position of the hands can really change the form of the muscles more than the other body parts. I'm still not totally happy with these muscles so I'll probably search for a critique from someone who knows their anatomy really well and can give me pointers. What I do really like about this is the use of bones. I tend to forget that bones do show through in bodies but some of my friends have been yelling at me to include them so I found that the elbows were a perfect spot and I think they came through really nice, so thanks guys :).

Next came the hand details, something which I also struggle with because it's less about muscles and more about bones and fat pads. I always tend to over-suggest forms so they just end up looking like crap. I'm also not sure if the characters hands should be more bulky or more skinny, I think I went with more skinny and I think because he is going to hold a sword or axe I should go more blocky. Most of the tools I used for this was the clay brush, the dam. standard in zsub and zadd, and the move tool and I really like the results. I'm not doing all the really fine detail yet because I still have those feet and I'll probably have to dynamesh them because I want the feet to be really exaggerated and cool looking because it's a goblin and I feel like I'll lose those really nice hand details anyway.

Next I'm going to fix those terrible pelvic muscles and then move on to the legs, so stay tuned :)