Rendering

It all comes down to how well one is able to break down and abstract the materials that need to be rendered. I tend to focus on really getting the specular component correct before moving on to other aspects of the material. Color/Albedo most of the times comes last and is at the least priority when it comes to determining the look of a particular material. I am using Arnold 5 for my renders. Also my render resolution is higher than 4K to capture the nuances of skin and other materials. A higher resolution also gives a lot of room for adjustments in the post process. For the skin I am using the aiStandardSurface shader. There are some really incredible advancements for skin shading in Arnold like the random walk SSS. It really helps to pop details and thin surfaces show believable translucency without the need for painting maps. So modeling and sculpting naturalistic features really pays off. For lighting I use area lights and mesh lights. The setup is very similar to a studio lighting setup. Mesh lights need to be used for Arnold to calculate caustics. So that there are some caustic effects on the eyes. I try to get my raw render to look as close to a desired final result. But inevitably some post processing has to be done to get the final aesthetic. For this I render out different passes or AOV’s like diffuse, specular, reflection, sss, lighting, transparency etc. These AOV’s are taken into Nuke and composited into a final beauty pass. Here the focus is mostly on developing areas of contrast and also critically adjusting the amount of information visible. Mostly consisting of simple grades and color corrections so that every component sits pleasingly together as a whole.