Inhabitants of the world. Any need for illustrations?

[12rounds]

The only thing I would say to make it better would be that most people using top down tokens have the resolution set to 100,150, or 200 px per inch for good zooming in, and most top downs expect stuff not part of the body/clothing/gear to be transparent png. You can take a quick look over at fouruglymonsters.com or rpgmapshare.com for a few other examples.

I'll make a note of that. Thanks.

Also, FYI, you could make a bit of side money producing portraits and tokens of this quality. Of course, if you give them away for free, that will not hurt my feelings any!!!!

Hmm... well so far it's only been nickles and dimes really. There are so many talented illustrators out there and I know many industry professionals have issues with 3D work. I have a well-paying day job as a Java programmer and do these illustrations in my spare time. Of course doing paid commission work would indeed be welcome, there's no denying that, but I've not actively pursued it (apart from having sold a few copies of character collections years ago and never receiving replies to inquiries sent over to a dozen or so gaming houses).

How do you do that ? So you use poser and then have some technique to get it into something you color up ? Is that it ? Do you trace out the 3D model with a pen or get some technique to get you part way there. You gotta shine some light on that process.

I first device a concept (on paper usually), then see if I can accomplish that without modelling and retexturing. Usually I can't so it's quite common to first retexture and morph models before I even start.

Setting up things in Poser and once happy in the overall composition then I apply a set of some rather complex shader nodes. Nowadays it just takes two to three render passes to get me where I want to. Then in Photoshop I blend the renders together and just paint over on the blended composite. I started refining this process years ago so all I can say it just takes a lot of practise. About 1/3 of total time is spent in 3D and 2/3 in 2D (Gimp, Photoshop). I also do minor modelling (morphs and small items) in Blender or Wings. It's fairly common for me to just paint whole costumes or other details too if I judge it's easier to do that way. I've been using a Wacom tablet for the past 6 years - I wouldn't even dream of doing anything like this with a plain 'ol mouse. It takes anywhere between 2-5 hours per image.

Oh yes... VTTs - you should play with them sometime.

Yea. I've been a traditional table-top player since mid-80's and I guess since I have a regular group, there's never been a need to get into virtual gaming in the net.

is it cell shading with post processing?

More or less so as explained above.