Texturing, rendering & lighting

Texturing and material setting has been a time consuming step, because of the nature of the all hand painted (in Photoshop) high resolution textures and because of material tweaking. I choosed to use Brazil as rendering engine and basically all the clothings are modifications of  the advanced Brazil Velvet shader, while the metallic stuff are a Brazil Chrome material.

See settings below which also explain the use of the normal maps in the materials slots.






About the lighting , there`s a direct key light which lits the whole stuff and cast shadow maps, a reddish low intensity fill light on the left and a blue one on the right…plus some very low intensity fill lights here and there to light the more dark areas.

I choosed to render a global illumination pass separately, and to overlay it later in compositing for a better control on shadowing.

Here`s the lighting setup, it`s for the standard unposed model, but the one of the final scene does not differ in the parameters, just slightly on some light`s positions.

Compositing & Touches up

After having rendered all the elements separately (main body, city, and bats) it was time to finally composite, and produce the final scene…it was a Photoshop job , including hand painting the cloudy sky and adding those little touches to make the whole  thing less artificial, like dirt and subtle detail on the city buildings, some distance fog…a glow effect on the white sky in the back and on the shiny metallic surfaces, overlay the global illumination pass rendered previously.
Touches also incluse localized changing (through masks) of hue/saturation , to make the background fit with the lighting of the max rendered scene, sharpening the whole thing and adding some subtle noise in the end.