Making the Digital Portrait of Mr. Obamaby Anto Juričić Toni, Bosnia and Herzegovina


Scale of the model is one of the important things that must be well tuned because  subsurface scattering weights relies on scale of your model. If you are not sure how to adjust scale of your model in Maya or max here is tip.

• First load your model and apply fast skin material on to it.
• Place some point light in front of your model and one point light behind model .
• Point light behind should shine through your model in red color when rendered.
• That red color comes from back scatter component of sss fast skin shader.
• Now adjust scale of your model or even better  scale conversion parameter in material until that red color only shines through  the ears  of your model.
• That way you will be sure that your scale is correct since fast skin shader comes already tuned  for optimal results.
  

Hair - For the short hair I use Maya fur. I don’t have any particular tips for Maya Fur, only thing is when you test fur be sure to turn off all shadows because it can take long time to render specially with raytracing shadows. Here is hair setup:



Lighting and Rendering - For the final rendering I use high density mesh since I am doing still image and I don’t care if model will be animatable. Rendering is the part which I find most time consuming  because  it takes  a lot of  test to come  up with good  relations between lights and shaders. Every test I did  took between 3 - 15 minutes.


For the lights I have used 4 lights…

Two back lights are colorized, one slightly blue and other yellow. Main key light comes from the side and above and I have one big aerial light in front of the model for key light. I set two area lights that are not illuminating scene but they are only visible in reflections (for the eye). All of the lights in my setup are area lights because they produce nice soft shadows but in cost of more render time.




I hope you have enjoyed this "making of" for any further explanations  feel free to contact me.

Anto Juričić Toni
monty.band [at] gmail.com      

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