You are right I am best off trying to create my own stuff and find my own styles,
Agreed. A lot of people build games just using "stock characters." Straight out of the box, no mods. Perfectly effective, but it doesn't take THAT long to do some "knob twiddling" to come up with something that's just that bit different. Either that, or use one of the Renderosity characters instead of the same old Daz3D characters over and over.
I wanted to start off with something I was already familiar with through playing the games found on here to learn and mess around with for practice
Oh, completely understand the "start with a base" approach. Aside from knob twiddling, another thing you can do to give a character a different "look" is to use the head and body from one character (possibly twiddled a bit), but then apply the skin from another. It's amazing how a different skin will change the look of a character.
The other thing that really stands out for some of those characters is the particular choice of hair style. The one from DMD is used in a fair number of different games - I see it and say "ah, another non-creative type." There are SO many different hairs available, that using the same ones over and over... well, 'nuff said. Granted, it's just a "personal thing," but still, make the character your own...
