Shader

The shader played a big role in the whole image, as we were trying to give the character and environment a metallic feel, partly based only on a color texture. For the shader we used many Arch & Design materials mental ray, mainly for the metal look that we were looking for. Some dirt and cloud noise shaders were also applied to both the character and environment. Some shader example pictures have been included in the following Lighting/Rendering section.

Lighting/Rendering

We didn't have very complicated lighting; we just used a basic 3-point lighting setup. We did separate RGB light on separate passes and separated three volumetric lights for the character.

As for the rendering part, this part was really important for the image as about 50% or more of the image consisted of so many different passes. There were more than 35 passes altogether, mainly consisting of:

• Metal Shader
• Dirt Shader
• Cloud/noise shader
• Volumetric lights
• RGB lights
• RGB selection
• Separate diffuse lights: Specular, HDRI and AO

Fig.06 – 09 show some examples of the important shader/lighting passes for the character.

Compositing

Compositing was also very important as this part was actually combining all the shader/output renders and edit the image to its full potential. We carefully crafted all the details and added dirt/scratches on the character by painting on the character and foreground railing, as well as a lot of passes adjustment, color correction, Bullet FX, depth of field, Z-Depth fog, additional volumetric, final cropping, background matte painting, glow, vignette, lens flare, and a bit of motion blur. All of those steps were done in Photoshop editing. The PSD file itself grew to more than 500 MB in one file since it had many high res passes all in one place.

Here is shaded version of the image (Fig.10).