Ian McKellen Fully Rendered

My time at CDIA is rapidly coming to a close now and I've begin the hustle to piece together a portfolio from the work I've done while here. This weekend I decided it would be a good time to finally finish up that Ian McKellen sculpt I had been working on a while back, so I sat down with zbrush, found some good tutorials on BPR rendering and went to town. A lot of my work recently has been getting pushed in the cartoonish direction so I wanted to take this opportunity to see what Zbrush has to offer in terms of rendering and realism. There's a myriad of problems with the sculpt but for what it is I would say I'm satisfied with the finished image.

This was entirely sculpted, painted and rendered in Zbrush, with the exception of the button down shirt and suit jacket. I dropped a low poly version of the head into Maya and then built up the shirt around his neck.

When painting the skin I had some help from Zbrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting by Scott Spencer. There was a great section about painting/ airbrushing skin and organic surfaces in there that helped me paint his face. The method is similar to the way a traditional air brush artist would paint models and puppets for live action film. 

After I was done painting and noodling away I came to the task of using BPR to render my final image. I'm fairly comfortable at this point with rendering in Maya but I hadn't really used BPR to render anything of substance until now. It took a bit of work and a lot of patience but it was a ton of fun. I relied heavily on this tutorial by Tony Reynolds at Eat 3D where he explains his preferred settings for getting the best Sub Surface Scattering results. 

After I rendered out all of the typical passes I went to work in Photoshop. I spent a lot more time here than I usually do, just tweaking levels and hand painting masks for a bunch of my layers. One great tip I got from that BPR tutorial was to paste the Ambient Occlusion render into a mask on the Ambient Color layer. This makes sure that the saturated colors from the Ambient Color render only show through where the AO render is pure white. After using that technique I then layered on the shadow and SSS layers. Both of which have masks where I hand painted exactly what I wanted to show through and what I didn't want to show. The next great tip gleaned from Eat 3D tutorial was to duplicate the Ambient Color layer, switch the layer to color burn, add a mask to it, and then just airbrush gently into the deep shadows so that the shadows take on a nice rich color. As soon as I did that the image flickered to life, and this is definitely a technique I'll be using in the future. After that, it was onto the spec layer with another painted mask and then onto the lens blur.

Here is an image of my photoshop layers if you're curious at all.

Here is a sheet displaying the different render passes from Zbrush.