Guess we could say the same about Milky’s reply then?

As I said, for more creative stuff I get a set of references and take some ideas off them and mash em into a character. For characters with actual faces revealed, I sometimes will use a create a character system in a game to get the facial structure looking right, or I will use some random dudes face on the internet and trace that.
The measurement rulers still come into play for the gear they have on them. Making a character normally consists of clothing, gender and body type decided first, and then I build off that and continue to their gear. Facial features are normally pretty rough until the end of making a characters face. For porting say the Male NBC veteran gear to the Female NBC veteran I copy paste between the figures a lot. Sometimes just trace the other and make it fit with the body of the other.
Explaining some of the creation of the characters and the steps is really complicated, atleast for Bullet since all sorts of inspiration was taken with him along with inspiration from my own stuff.

1: The only thing I do before going into the creation menu is typically if it is a recreation of a gun or basic object, I just make sure I have a perfect reference for the thing I am creating and make sure I have any parts I am building off on in the 1st frame of the animation to reference off using the trace frame feature. A recent thing I am doing is setting out some of my measurement rulers to scale things correctly, in example the bullet a gun fires when building it into a magazine.

If it something more creative and built on my imagination, since I base much of my stuff off real stuff I grab smaller individual references that I put together. I also use my measurement rulers for this too and do no sketching. For my most recent fictional gun, I made a really crude and basic rough draft of the design in SN before I elaborated on the shape and design or even color in a new figure. I also make sure I start creation with some sort of direction for the figure and as I create things I balance out details and design and add things going on a tweak them to make sure everything fits together.

2: My main tricks mainly consist of using to textbox to make sure things are straight where I need them. Mostly I will trace more geometrically complicated objects to give that high quality look more and nail the shape more accurately. (Doing that also is a sacrifice of nodes but I don’t care too much) On my characters I need to make sure they use a ton more for polyfills in joints because of the complex base anyway. I make segments go the direction of smartstretch as much as I can so the function better with smartstretch on figures now. I also always put together stuff before I consider it complete and resize any limbs using the segment resize. Recently I haven’t really needed to do thst though, since everything I have is more polished and functional than before.