First of all let me apologise for the long reply, but since we have another artist here who knows more about what I was talking about, I do have to get into more detail.
My intention here is not to get into squabbles, but people saying stuff like this is getting very disheartening.
I have no problem with people shitting on my art. That's their opinion and they are entitled to it, and maybe they even have a good point or two about my art being bad.
That's not the problem here. The problem here is how much effort you guys think I put in and you are diminishing the time and care I put into this work, acting like I hardly did anything. All I know is that i've spent weeks doing this thing, learning ZBrush and how to use fibremesh, every day after, work trying to perfect the sculpt. It's not that bad being told you've done a bad, job, but it's pretty freaking horrible being told that you didn't work hard on something that you really did.
You certainly do know more than the other naysayers, I can see that you have done a fair bit of modelling in zbrush yourself. I have to say, I did like a fair bit of your work too, once I checked out your artstation account. I particularly like these pieces:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/RQPEO
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ndA6e
You have talent and know your forms and shapes. IDK if you are a student or employed by a game company, but you've done some fairly good work. However, I don't think that necessarily makes you entitled to be a know-it-all, who can judge how much one thing should be vs another. Especially with your comment about retopology. I disagree with you entirely on that.
Yes it's a static mesh not meant for game design, which is I guess what you're into because you don't seem to use much fibremesh. However, You simply cannot sculpt on surfaces with bad topology if you are using Alphas. They come out all wrong and look absolutely horrible as well as slow down your PC to a crawl when you have a mesh resolution of 20 million polygons. I might be wrong in assuming this but you seem to like doing low poly modelling, IDK if you've used alphas alot, and if you have, I assume you've used it on an extremely large scale so you could convert it into a bump map. Yes I definitely needed to spend time on retopologizing.
My point is, for whatever reason, I definitely needed to retopo for very subtle pores and wrinkles. The alphas just didn't come out right. Also for some reason, sculpting with bad topo in Zbrush at extremely high polys really slows down my PC. Maybe its the calculations that have to be done behind the scenes on the cpu IDK.
To kind of further my disagreement with you saying that I've "hardly done anything", you of all people should know how freaking difficult it is to get convincing hairstyles with Fibremesh. It's a goddamned nightmare, but if you get it right it pretty much knocks regular hand sculpted mesh out of the water. I see you have used Fibremesh yourself. but the best examples I can find are these:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/w4kvw
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rZYLE (this fox is really cute btw)
IDK, if you have more impressive examples that you haven't posted online. If you have I would love to see them. My point is, Fibremesh wise, those are fairly basic applications.
I'm not knocking your art. For what you've used them for, the mesh is appropriate. All I'm saying is, it doesn't seem like you've ever actually utilised Fibremesh to its full potential. Not saying that I have, I'm just saying, you as a fellow CG Artist should know that making hair from Fibremesh is a job unto itself. It basically is like sculpting hair in 3D with little strings that definitely don't behave when you try comb them and spread all over the place, clipping your model and also blowing up into weird artefacts if you don't do things right. Point is, the fact that I recreated her hair in fibremesh from scratch warrants some credit. And if that isn't '3D modelling' I don't know what is.
Next, let me quote you.
Most of the people here see something they have no clue about and think you've done a great job
Please don't try to pretend like I'm bamboozling people. You've read the steps I've listed out myself, none of it is untrue. Yes, we disagree on how much effort it would have taken, but hopefully I am posing my case to you weel enough that you are reconsidering. I have been completely Upfront about where I've gotten my models from and whom to give credit it's the first thing I mention in my image description on deviantART and i've mentioned that the model is not mine like THREE times seperately on this post. Here I am doing it again, just to make it a FOURTH time, so people get the idea that I'm not 'stealing art' like you seem to be claiming that I am doing.
https://sketchfab.com/models/5a3c1688c0a3455ea33cf21e6cc56595
Take a long hard look at that model, and you tell me that it didn't require a lot of work to get to the final result that I did.
Maybe you aren't trying to say that I stole art, but I really don't like your tone, with you saying that 'you've had your work plagiarised and sold', as if you're implying that I am doing the same thing. I am neither selling this, nor am I plagiarising - I mean do I need to credit the original artist for a fifth time too?
Yes I didn't credit him in the title. Yes if I had to go back I would rephrase the title if I knew that people would get so offended by it. But can you guys please stop pretending like I'm a talentless person, who stole someone else's art and basically did nothing.
I mean look at that base model. If I posted a render of that on this subreddit, you think anyone would care? It's an awsomely made model and I'm not knocking the original artist's work. The point is, I did something freaking original/unique with it which got it to one of the top pages here on this subreddit.
The fact that you guys even KNOW that the model was not originally is because I've credited the original Artist sooo many times. Take your Soldier 76 sculpt for example, that could easily have been taken off an ingame model or someone elses work. The irnoy is that if I kept my mouth shut and didn't say anything I wouldn't have any naysayers at all. The fact that I've done my due diligence and am getting punished for it is pretty uncool...
Also, IDK what renderer you use. I only used zbrush's one. I don't have money to buy a better rendering software. Nor do I have the time to learn an open source one at the moment. Everything I did, i've done in Zbrush, which is pretty freaking difficult when you don't have all the fancy materials of a proper software meant for rendering. All your pieces are showcase pieces, with a workflow purely meant to show off your sculpts and models. I managed to take that workflow and use it for illustrative portrait purposes, whether or not I suceeded is obviously up to you, my point is most CG artists I talk to dismiss that workflow immediately and tell me to use Keyshot.
Getting good results only using Zbrush is difficult and time consuming. Photoshop has to compensate for what zbrush lacks. Point is it's unfair to undermine this essential, difficult step down to 'Nothing'. Have your tried to get glossy hair in Zbrush? Because as far as I can tell it's pretty freaking hard. Definitely spent ages on photoshop repainting hair so that at least it had a satisfactory level of shine.
Finally let me get onto your my final point. Which is where you say, 'you can try your hardest to justify it but the hardest part is getting the shape and anatomy right, not the sculpting on top of a model you've subdivided.' I'm man enough to admit I agree with you here. But like I said, how many times do I have to mention that I am not creating any illusions about this. I have NOT lied or hidden anything, the title was an accident. I have credited the guy multiple times in this reddit thread and on DA. You are right, and let me state for the goddamned record : I DO NOT TAKE OWNERSHIP/CREDIT OF THE ORIGINAL BASE MODEL. I will take credit for my render and my edited model. I'm not selling it, I'm sharing it so people can hopefully enjoy it.
Also, IDK if this means anything to you or not or whether you'd disagree but imo, the rule where 'The hardest part is getting the facial anatomy and proportions right', doesn'te really apply to OW characters. It applies to getting likenesses for celebrities, for high res show piece renders and headsculpts for 1/6 scale figures. However, Overwatch which has a pixar-esque style. The shapes and forms are simplistic and perfect. You can easily replicate forms because there is a ton of reference to begin with. The problem of course is time. It takes a lot of time to get those forms right. It's not difficult though. The point is there should be no shame in saving time with your sculpts as long as you reach your end goal. You're a student/cg artist who's livelyhood depends on your body of work you have all the time in the world to do this stuff because it IS your work. I only pretty much have evenings, even then I might still have other obligations. So forgive me for not starting from scratch. Especially in light of the fact that I have given credit where credit is due.
You forget that I am an artist too and I have had my work plagiarised/uncredited too. Case in point, look at some of my more popular pictures on DA.
Ok, i'll stop now.
Sorry for the long-arse reply. I admittedly got triggered, but I mean every word of what I say. If anything I hope this long ass post invites some further discussion is people actually bother reading it. Please don't simplify it down to ABC. IMO if i had to come up with a really cheesy analogy, It's definitely more like me doing parts G to Z on a scale from A to Z for me. I genuinely feel that way.