Render

(Fig12 - 17) I did the render in many steps. We could structure them in this way: beauty pass of the environment, beauty pass of the mummy, ambient occlusion, specular, Z-depth (to simulate the depth of field), and then many steps to stress or to decrease reflections and strokes of light. The ambient occlusion was very useful in the environment and is vital to the characters because it stresses the model and creates all the little shadowed areas which would get lost in the main context. I used a 2000 x 1600 resolution but, thanks to the various phases, every step was shorter than 5 minutes to render.

Compositing

(Fig18) After all the rendering came the time to start compositing it with photo editing programmes, such as Photoshop, unifying all the levels and weighing them out as you like. The ambient occlusion had to be rendered in Multiply, and I kept it to a percentage of 60 % so as not to weigh the shadows down too much. I then duplicated the beauty pass and inserted it blurred in Screen mode, distressing it a little to light up some areas up in order to give a "burned film” effect.




The compositing can change an image very deeply, and it's up to every single person to use it in the best possible way!

And now: let's finish the image off in Photoshop, trying to fix the problems and stressing those parts that we are most interested in.