well, attempting to show off work here, warning: n

nice job on the model and skin, especially since it was your first attempt at making a realistic one.
Got any tips or techniques you want to share?

Lead paint: delicious but deadly!

I've just switched on the HTML code option for the forum btw ..

Just curious as to how you went about skinning your mesh? Did you chop up your model,flatten, morph it back, and use some unwrap plugin ? Or did you use some third party program like Deepaint etc ? Or another way ?

I'm in the process of modelling a female model myself, and the steps of doing the aforementioned chop/flatten/morph/unwrap to texture seems a bit tedious... I'm hoping there's an easier way..

'unwrap, morph, flatten'
Good god no, that sounds too much like work.

i do my models in lightwave, and since i hate the max poly selection tools (find them difficult to use) I cut up my model in to mirrorable bits and shapes that can be easily uv mapped (like cylinders or flat areas) so end up with a mesh for the top and bottom of the hands, the arm, half the head, and half the body (from neck to toe) and underside of shoe. uv mapping then takes about an hour to try and remove as much distortion as posible (with checkerboard texture applied to be able to see distortion)

//updated pic with some proportion change.

um, ment that it is my first attempt to make a realistic texture, had been avoiding doing real texture work on computer till now. had made 2 other 1000-2000 poly female meshes already

personally i like max's tools better, mainly cause thats what i learnt to start with. From what i have seen in lw7 i don't like it, everything should be intergrated into the one application rather than having one for modeling and one for animation. I can't really see the benefit of doing it like that, then again i only used the applications for a short time.
Anyway the method you described in lw i have tried in max and personally i hate it. It's just so irritating i think, you just don't have enough control and it takes too long in my experience. Usefull if you have a basic model.
I know about the morpher method but don't know anything about it, hows that done? Keep in mind im still a beginner and haven't starting playing around with the morpher plugin.
I unwrap by detaching large parts of my model and flatening then arranging the UVW co-ords in UVW Unwrap. I find it's alot quicker and easier.
One thing i have heard good things about is deep uv, a companion to deep paint 3d (or you can just use it to uvw map) i haven't used it though so im not sure if it's any better.
Also just out of curiosity can max use shaders like maya or lw7? and when is max5 coming out?

Bloody hell its a giant harmonica!

The morphing bit I mentioned is just after the process where you split all your polygons, lay them flat, unwrap them, then morph the polygons back into the hidden copy.
And yeh, you're either a Max user or a Lightwave user.. their interfaces and methods are so different that if you learn one application first, you'll usually hate the other one. I'm use to Max, and I didn't like Lightwave, especially since you had a modeller part and an animation part (and the texturing had to be done in the animation part! - although they've changed this since.)

For UV mapping in max, I just select the polys I want and then add the uvw map modifier, than adjust it etc, then apply an edit mesh, hide the poly i JUST MAPPED then select some more, . I used to do it by the detachment method but I had a few instances where the morpher would screw up. also when I was on windows 98, using morphers would cause max to crash.

Lead paint: delicious but deadly!

well, to each his own, modelling tools end up being quite personal, but having shown my modeling method to several people at my old work i know i was 4 to 10 times faster than the max/ maya/ softimage users. Max is nice big piece of software, but i can fit my copy of LW4 onto a floppy disk and run about 10 instances of it without slowing down my 350Mhz piece of shit computer. all that said i do use max to uvmap and animate... // and get to wait 5 min for it to load, and again after each crash....

You're absolutely right.. use whatever's comfortable for you. And that male model is absolutely awesome. Great proportions (although maybe the neck is a little too wide?), and great skin work too.
The female model has some slight problems with proportion (arms a little too short... waist a little too wide from the side view.. I would've done the stomach area a bit taller.. the head is absolutely perfect though).. And I like how you've toned down the colour for the male model compared the the female one.. good stuff!