Hello everyone. I'm recently addicted to Mount and Blade and I'm very much looking forward to the next one. You're doing an outstanding job from what I can see. As a fellow artist though, I'd like to suggest some improvements to the facial work done thus far. I understand everything is a WIP, but I simply can't resist the urgent to barge in (I've been a forum lurker so far).
Here's a quick overpaint meant to demonstrate how to achieve a more natural look, in my humble opinion:
1) Clean up your normal map a little. I understand you're going for the rugged crinkled look, but if you add too many wrinkles and bumps to the normal, it won't sit well with a variety of expressions (unless your morph the textures as well). The nose bridge and laugh lines while accentuated in some expressions, will look distorted in others.
2) Correct some of the anatomy. Especially the muscle and bone structure, particurlarly around the nose area, which could use a few tweaks. The ear height could be slightly raised and the eyes could be slightly less deep (unless this is a random facegen creation, which might explain the oddities).
3) I understand with the amount of characters on screen, the skin shader can't be an advanced one, with accurate sub-scattered surfaces. If you're expecting some harder shadows, I'd suggest to tone down the bump mapping and restrain some more the specularity map to the more shiny areas. That will sit better with a simpler shader. If there's to be a dirt map or dirt on the color map, I'd suggest dirt speckles on places where they can't break up the reading of important expression lines. What I suppose is meant to be dirt around the mouth, might accidently be adding too much age to the character.
4) I also understand you can't accurately cast self shadow on the eyes, so I suggest to tone down the whiteness of the eyeglobe textures, in order to compensate for the lack of those. It would really help if you could always cast a light on the eyes for that sharp specular sheen. I'm not sure how Valve did it with HL2, but it was big thing back then to help give some life to their characters. That was back in the early 2000's source engine, so I can't imagine being too taxing on the hardware.
I hope these don't come across as insulting or anything, I mean that not as cheap criticism (they're already miles above M&B models), but as a friendly attempt to contribute!
PS: I love the work done on the hair! Great job indeed.