Hey Ed

I am starting to get things done but still a long way to go. I guess I should have hired someone but always have preferred doing things myself. Glad to hear you got a new job (teaching art?) I think you will find as a teacher, you will learn more as you teach than you would have not as one
I am finding Giga extremely useful. I mentioned that I have hundreds and hundreds of old renders and projects that didn't make posting. I kept them because there is a lot to be learned and a lot of old ideas ready to hatch like a phoenix and become reborn. This first image was done in Poser, Raydream Studio for the helmet and Kai by way of OLD photoshop lol. I randomly chose it. Looking at it closely I decided to B&W it. I then took it and resized from 800x to 6000x outside of photoshop. On the reimport into photoshop I isolated the section I wanted to concentrate on cut it out, pasted to a new image, and resized it once again to 6000x which I have saved as a Psd file. What you are seeing is a resized Jpeg saved at medium, quality at 1600x. What this has done is given me the ability to resize the Psd file to 4000x, take it into Verve as Png and do a much better image by underpainting beneath the layer. I can be light with the paint because I want to maintain my "Ink Line". Once back in photoshop you can adjust the saturation to your taste. This reopens old roads for me.
You referred to an old image I did and posted in a thread called "Postcards from Kohaku (japanese for space) at the Zbrush Sculptris forum. The method I used was to sculpt the creature with Sculptris. I imported an inverted space shot as Sculptris's background and applied an image I mangled with Kai and mirroring in Photoshop as material to the sculpt. I then saved the image. I will go back and explore that one day because materials and backgrounds made in Verve would provide a nice synergy with Sculptris and I would like to sculpt something.
On Incursion, I do see a figure on the right side and several possibles on the left. These were random lol. I focused in on a 4000x image and cut out the detail. resized the detail to 4000 and flattened the colors, and applied a small hue change to bring it out. This could be fun to reinforce the character. I am seeing a japanese elf from her left side wearing a kimono with a long sleeve. The warp tool in Verve and a few black strokes to reinforce her and voila! I do plan to work on the beastman's nose. Somehow it was overpowered by the underlay of the first verve character. You can see the better version of his head earlier in this thread. We will see but I am closer to being done than you might think.
Hope this helps

edit: I removed the small 800x because it was just too ugly for me to contemplate

The point was to show the difference and to strip it down to it's lines to rework it at 4000 in Verve. This is something that can be done with a lot of old failed projects which that one was. Now I get to fix his eyes

- Honor Guard.jpg (332.64 KiB) Viewed 15376 times

- Incursion detail.jpg (316.3 KiB) Viewed 15376 times