Rendering

I thought about different ways of presenting my work. I could grab a viewport screen or render with mental ray. I decided to go the mental ray route since I wanted a big render of my character.

First I created three lights, all white. One acted as a Key light, one Fill and one Rim light. Once I was happy with their brightness and shadow casting, I started giving them color and creating a mood.

After that, I helped pop up some stuff by lighting them separately(including jars). No extra mental ray stuff was used; I wanted it to be as close as possible to a real-time render (Fig.14).

Post-Processing (Photoshop)

Once I had my render, I decided to give some love to the background since it was a plain color in Max. I overlayed some details while keeping it simple and not annoying. I also faked in some SSS on the ears and color corrected the overall image (Fig.15 – 16).

Final Words

I am very happy with this model. It helped me learn new techniques (polypainting was one of them) and also helped me jump some limits. Looking back at it, there are a lot of things I would improve and change, but I really want to move on from this character and start working on new exciting stuff. After all I had a lot of fun making him and I want to keep that feeling without ruining my experience by going back and tweaking stuff (Fig.17 – 20).