Making of the Alien Nature by Pascal Raimbault, New Zealand Web: www.cgfeedback.com

I am not 100 % satisfied with the intensity, color etc which means I will need to add extra spotlights to have more control over the lighting. Oh here I 've added a floating drone for composition but not too sure about it.

Here is a view of my generic shader in the hypergraph. Very basic shading network, but I found handling subsurface scattering in rfm correctly was the tricky part. Here as I am using HD textures (2K, 4K, and 8K), the hypershade preview gets truncated.

Here is the attribute editor screenshot for the body blinn shader (note how low the diffuse value is)

And here are the renderman extra attributes at the bottom of the shader (reflection and subsurface scattering).

So let's now have a deeper look at SSS (sub surface scattering).

So, renderman is going to render a diffuse pass and bake it as a point cloud. Then it will process the point cloud to get the sss effect. The command is ptfilter, and the nice thing about rfm is that you can edit this command line within maya.

Here I have plugged an albedo texture map (desaturated version of color map) into the shader. Usually to specify the diffusemeanfreepath, a single value is set using rfm sss attributes, but here I have entered rgb values instead (ideally we would use a texture map). Be carefull with those values they define the distance the light is travelling inside the object before scattering. The smaller the object, the smaller the values may be. Here is my full ptfilter line.

"\${RMANTREE}/bin/ptfilter" -filter ssdiffusion -albedo fromfile -diffusemeanfreepath 1.5 0.7 0.7 ${ARGS} "[passinfo this/0 filename]" "[passinfo this filename]"

Here is a part of one of the numerous point clouds I used to render my scene (displaying the sss channel here)

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