Critique on animal illustration

Please critique the attached illustration of a running Lion. I struggle a great deal with the particle system and appropriate render settings for hair and am interested to see if others see this as a problem with the image. I also find problems with the quality of the sculpting, especially with the lack of surface definition. To some extent I attribute this to how the hair system tends to average surfaces and am not sure whether I should alter the base mesh or hair settings.

Thank you for your input and suggestions.

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It is a good image, I’m sure it took a while to get this far; you should be proud of your progress.

I think your model looks really good except for around the eyes and maybe the nose. Male lions have broader features and they look like they’re wearing eyeliner. This looks more like a lioness with a mane.

To really take it to the next level I think you’ll need to comb the mane a lot. It needs more volume and should be less ‘streaky’, I think it’s because of child particles grouping too closely. The hair on the body looks great but maybe a bit too ‘groomed’. You could add some color variety and a bit more random length or patchiness.

Good luck!

To me, the only problem that makes it less realistic is the face. As howtoblend mentioned above, male lions have dark lines around their eyes. They also have a small “beard” like growth at the bottom of their mouth usually.

Very very good work on the body though!

If you are going for more realism - What sticks out for me is the shorter fur on the body. It looks too regular, Like i’ts covered in felt. Fur on lions, and especially male lions is always shedding, and it ends up looking lumpy and irregular because of that process. The left rear leg you can see how nice and neat the fur looks.

Its good but in my view the head is too small in relation to the body. Also I recall lions often have a darker stripe of fur down the back? I agree with the other points made as well. For me the hair should also have a degree of “rope-iness” to it if you get my meaning. Im not very experienced with the hair system - would that be clumpiness?

Thanks for the critiques. Sounds like I need to make some adjustments to modelling, paint and particle systems. Might be worthwhile to start over to see if I can improve.