Lighting and Rendering
There is very few lights in the scene, the directions of them are pretty straight. Depending of the style I’m looking for, two direct lights are just enough for this purpose. The area light will provides an accurate soft shadow with primitive rectangle. These shadows are generating in raytracing. This will give a nice interaction with the skin and the ribbon for instance.
The regard of the character leads to a point outside the canvas. I gave a representation of the target with a second light source which is a point light. It draws the silhouette of the character out of the dark background. The positioning of this light will pop out the pilosity on the skin that I’ll add at the end of the process. The principal lights added, the global illumination is active to bring more realism to the scene. The shadows get more diffused and the lights aren’t seemed to come from two directions anymore. I keep it subtle so that we still feel the studio’s lighting.
I decide to render with mental ray then I convert my file texture in *.map format to optimize the renders. The outputs are in float bits to enhance in order to get more range for the compositing.
Compositing
Here we can see most of the passes used for the final compositing. The final output has been desaturated to obtain a black and white tint. And finally the image is completed.
Hope you liked the explanation of techniques used in this image. Thanks for reading, please send me your queries and comments.
