AnimSchool Fantasy Character WIP - Long Tran

amazing lighting ? 

Thanks @abdulrahmen!

After last rounds of revisions I finally have my final render! I rendered the final scene and exported it at 4k resolution. It took my PC about 2 hours to generate the render, I'm not sure if that is normal or very slow. What is your guys experience generating hi-res renders?  

Another new workflow for me in this project is use the Arnold AOVs to render different light passes. This was awesome since in the end I got a 32bit .exr file with my different lighting setups separated out into different layers. It also allowed me to generate some very clean masks that helped me with the compositing that I would do in photoshop.

For the compositing stage in photoshop, I wanted to keep the changes relatively minimal and only make adjustment that I felt would accentuate the image. I believe I could have accentuate the glowing effect ever more in my maya scene using particle or emissives but I felt that it would be simplest to make these lighting adjustments in photoshop. I used a free plugin I found called exr-io for working with the 32bit layers in photoshop. I did a final pass adjusting the brightness of my various lights, knocking back a few highlight and visually experimenting with the glow of the gem and sword. I made sure to frequently switch my color mode to grayscale (you can do this quickly on on Windows 10 just by pressing Ctrl + Win + C!) to evaluate the overall value of the image. Even though I had a bright glowing objects in my image I wanted to make sure the the highest area of contrast remained within the face.

Here is my final beauty shot! Let me know what you think!

.5x.png

This one is the render straight out of Arnold before I made the final lighting adjustments in photoshop. 

Wireframe

Very sweet character, man. I love it!!! 

Thanks @lifelover90!

I was looking at your artstation earlier today. Amazing stuff! I love your creature work. 

I love it! Your WIPs has also been really insightful 🙂 

Thanks @birdymog! I'm glad you got something out of the posts. I've learned so much from other artists share online so I'm glad to be able to pass on helpful knowledge where I can. 🙂