UGAC - 17th Century Plague Doctor

I'm currently casually taking part in a competition over at cgtalk. The challange is to take an known character or type of character and to reverse/change it. So for example cheerful darth vader, Mrs Mumra, medievil master chief or a futuristic medievil knight.

I'm going with a modern cyborg take on a 17th Century Plague Doctor.

Thing is my thread is hardly getting any comments so I'm posting here to get any extra feedback. I'll just post my progress so far which includes research, concept and modeling.

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Thanks for all your comments. To sum it up so far...

I'm glad I stayed away from the gasmask idea, I can see why people see it as cool but I just felt it was too cliche going away from the plague doctor design.

I don't want to make the beak sharp and angled since I don't see this character as an evil nasty character but rather a 'healer'. Yep the high poly was created in zbrush. I did a lightmap today,

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Quote from Psyshokiller

Looks fine so far. What do you mean by Lightmap btw.? AO?

Heh, was talking about this last night at work. In the end we agreed lightmaps and AO are more or less the same thing. I took the lightmap and played with the levels so that it had an AO effect.

Initially I assigned a mentral ray shader with ambient occlusion but for some crazy reason it would only render out a 75% corner of my map. So in the end I applied standard shader, threw in a skylight, turned on light tracer and rendered to texture.

I got a very soft result and had to adjust levels in photoshop