thanks for the reply, I haven't worked on the characters yet, still fooling with the background, but I'll try to address those problems

I've tried giving a bark texture to the tree


edit:
recolored the bird to fit into the piece as well

pretty nice, I like how simple the model is, I kinda wanna do one now...

what's with the line down the middle of the model in the 3d render? did you mirror it? that's happened to me before, no clue how to solve it

Love this, the style is so awesome, closer to what I was aiming for with my low poly model. Would be perfect for a game (you're spot on with going for DS style). Nice presentation too, the thick outlines and spinning animation look really cool.  

Oh and the animations are great too.

Kenneth's stuff looks good because it is mostly rectangular polys on the model mapped to rectangular polys on the uv. Where he does have a triangle or a deformed quad he either give it a solid fill (fit the whole poly into a single texel), or keeps quad close to rectangular.

You can get around this problem by matching the shape model and uv polys:

Hm... thanks, I see what you mean, I think it would look bad if pixels were cut off, but I can see where you would want to do that, like if it was subtle or there was nothing important on the edges, in fact if you had like a circle inside a deformed quad, it would be better to do it that way.

Anyway, here's my progress, started over, fairly happy with the body for now, not sure if I should leave the head in it's current shape or play with it a little. All I did was bevel a cube. It feels lazy, and looks a bit too uniform imo, but it seems like a lot of low poly heads are like that (most are low poly spheres, but I didn't want it to be too circular since it might not match the style). I also don't want it to be too realistic, I want a cartoony chibiish look.  



EDIT:
After 800,000,000 hours, I'm finally done UV mapping.

I think that took longer than the modeling. Though I do like UV mapping, I actually know what I'm supposed to achieve, unlike modeling where I don't know what route to take. Next I shall transfer the texture, and hope it doesn't look like crap!

EDIT:

And here it is! Textured n all. I would have done a spinning animation, but I can't figure out how to get a nice render in maya.
Only a couple things need to be fixed. A couple planes on the bottom of the side of the head were skewed, but I just used a solid color to avoid it (even though they were perfect rectangles).  Now the only thing that's messed up is the butt. Maybe I can fix it.

Final Texture Map:

If you for some reason wanted to see how the map is layed out, here's a screen: http://i.imgur.com/yNoZT.png

Any crits?

I would like to do an animation, but I can't figure it out (well I can make a spinning animation, but I want to use bones and make a walk cycle), if anyone knows a good tutorial link me. I found a couple, but they were either really bad, or slightly too advanced. One series had a whole part on feet. My guy doesn't even have feet!

thanks for responding 


how does kenneth do it then?
you can tell in some of his works, that the pixels are stretched correctly


like in this robots shoulders

so are you saying you'd have to divide it up more like this?


doesn't adding more polygons to make it look better kind of defeat the purpose of lowpoly?


EDIT:
or maybe this would work? I'm not sure if/how I could change it, or how I could have created it like that (apart from creating the model 1 point at a time, I used cubes then attached them)