Materials

I used subsurface scattering for his skin (VRayfast SSS2). SSS material is dependent on the scale of the scene, so I made sure to set an according number in the scale factor. Real life skin has two types of specular to it (Fig.11). One has a bigger falloff with a weaker specular hotspot; the other has a much tighter spec and more noticeable hotspot. To get both of them in the same material I used a V-Ray blend material, set the second material to VRaymat, turned  on Additive(shellac) mode and from then had access to my second specular (Fig.12). For my Displacement map I made a 32-bit Displacement map from Mudbox and put it in the V-Ray Displacement mod. 32-bit takes away a lot of the guesswork that you normally get as the information is baked in the texture already. For the armor pieces and the weapon, the materials relied a lot on the textures. I only played with the gloss and a couple of minor settings to get the desired effects; after all it was a modeling and texture competition.

Lighting and Rendering

I used linear (gamma 2.2) workflow with V-Ray for 3ds Max. In the GI Environment slot I used a HDR image at low settings just to help with the light bouncing. I also used two V-Ray lights, one which was the main fill light which was a bright yellow color, and the other more orangey on the opposite side to soften up the render. I then added a back light to create a strong contour and a couple of small lights to punch up different spots I wanted to pop out more. A V-Ray plane was also used to help with the bounce lighting of the GI (Fig.13 – 14).