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Skin Shading - There are tons of different approaches for skin, and I like to use the misss_fast_skin_maya. The first thing I done, set the radius of the different layers individually (setting the weight of the other layers to 0) with a single light pointed in the direction of scatter effect (back scatter would be a light from the back of the object). The radius will be depend on your scene scale, so it is trial and error until the scatter effect is as “deep” as you’d like. Once the radius is set, then I start to add texture maps.
I usually leave the overall color channel mostly white and paint veins, moles, scars, etc. etc. in this channel.
The Diffuse layer is a bluish tint, similar to what you’d see on a dead body once all the blood is drained.
The Epidermal layer is a bluish tint as well, but slightly warmer than the diffuse layer.
The Subdermal layer is a redish tint.
Since there was not a lot of back light, I did not texture map the back scatter layer, and I left it a well saturated red.
For mapping various weight channels, I plugged my specular map into a combination of contrast, set range, and RGB to luminance nodes. This allowed me to adjust the contrast of the map, increase or decrease the values, and then convert that information into luminance.
These are things I could have done in Photoshop, but using these nodes helped relieve the memory usage during render time.
Environment Shading - The rest of the scene mainly uses the mia architectural shader. The most complicated shading network was for the metal framing of the mirror. I used the mix8layer shader, which acts like the Maya Layered Shader, but integrates better with Mental Ray. FYI, the mix8layer does not ship with Maya 2009, so I had to download and install the shader (google search it).
Hair - I used Joe Alter’s Shave and a Haircut for the hair rendering. I find that this system is faster and more intuitive than the Maya fur system. To keep render time manageable, I disabled raytrace shadows and irradiance. By cutting down the render time here, it allowed me to increase the Hair Count, Segments and Passes, which gave me a nice result. I only used one texture map, which was input into the Density. I wanted to spend some time working on the hair line, so the final render did not look like a wig.
Render Settings - I used Final Gather and raytrace shadows for all. Mostly settings were pretty modest.
Post Effects - The two major things that were done in After Effects were the depth of field effect and an overall noise to help the continuity between different layers. I also think that adding noise is especially effective to the areas that are out of focus.
For the depth of field, a Z-Depth pass from Mental Ray was used with the Lens Blur effect in After Effects.
After all the layers are assembled, the Add Grain effect was added.
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