[Piotr]

I used Silo for base meshes and some poly modeling like buttons/hat.

This head was my comeback to rendering as displaying basic models doesn't cut it for me anymore. Nor do I feel like butchering models down to lowpoly for my portfolio.
Relearning rendering was pain. Initially I was doing it with mental fail however at some point it flat out refused to render so I had to switch to 3delight. At least I could slap subpixel displacements on everything.

Silo+Zbrush+Photoshop+XSI+3delight.

Lighting is AO + several lights. No GI unfortunatelly because color bleeding didn't want to work with skin at this stage and I don't feel like waiting for a bugfix.

[xbo]

HI Piotr,
nice work
Nothing to critic jet.

[Memag Neman]

Great comeback.
You use new 3delight plugin or the one for xsi6?

[Grapix]

Amazing work, top row !

[Everett Paul Stretch]

Very Very Nice!!!!

[Polygod]

Looks great. How much time did you put into it and what size are your textures?

[Grapix]

Could you please share some tips on making that peach fuzz material on the hat.

[lovisx]

I'm a fan

[rusteberg]

wow! that IS nice!

[bolatron]

great eye for detail

[theflu]

fantastic work.
already saw this on zbrushcentral.
you can be proud, outstanding!

[RogerKnightly]

Spectacular stuff. what kind of render time are we looking at here?

I tried 3Delight but i found it was EXCRUCIATINGLY slow especially when it came to any sort of ray tracing. What would come out in under a minute with mental ray and FG took about 10X as long.

The subpixel displacement was pretty jaw dropping though

[Piotr]

Renderman has different purpose than raytracers.

Renderman is fast where its important to me. Displacements, AA, DOF, hair, bump. Also for those who animate, motion blur. Thats why its used in movies.

This one is 30 minutes beauty render + 30 minutes raytraced AO. Shading rate is 0,25 so that means 4x4 poligons per pixel if I remeber correctly. There is raytracing on the face. 100k hair. Subpixel displacements on clothes. Thats how I created peachfuzz. There is fractal procedural on all the clothes + some falloff effect. So we are probably talking here about 10 milions poligons. Noise free DOF etc. Render was silky smooth, the grain is actually post effect. Two area lights (raytracing) +5 shadowmapped ones.

On top of it high AA. Its 8x8 samples and filter width of 8. AA alone in mental would be a murder to my cpu and its needed in order to get rid of ring artefacts on cloth patterns.

I had to switch to 3delight because mental fail couldn't handle it.
But of course if reytracing and GI is your primary focus then renderman is not for you.

Ill write some more info in few days when Ill gather questions around forums and just write huge info post about that character.

[theflu]

cool, nice to hear, looking really forward for your info about 3delight, as ive been recently rendering in mantra and was blown away by the speed and quality.

[3dEE]

amazing sculpt and rendering! congrats.
good to see your work again.

[bobtronic]

that's really a nice portrait. good to see new work from you again.

cheers,
Matthias

[Piotr]

Hi.

Thanks for the comments. I wasn't replying for some time because I wanted to wait for all the questions so I can make a bigger info post. So here are things people were asking about on various forums:

Some technical info.
Zbrush model is around 8 milion poligons or something like that. Textures are from 2k to 4k depending on the object. Face is 4k.

Scene is rendered with 2 area lights (raytraced of course) without transparency for speed purposes + 5 lights with 1k deep shadowmaps. Ambient occlusion was rendered seperately as a pass. Face has raytraced reflection so do the eyes. Whole thing is done with displacements, even toothpick . Clothes have fractal procedural as displacement on top of the zbrush one and thats what is giving them the rough and almost hairy look of the hat and adds quite alot of poligons in the process. But hey, thats the main strength of renderman so of course I will slap displacement on everything I can. Don't know the final count of poligons for rendering but it will be quite alot because of that fractal. 10 milion at least. Also 100k hair in the scene.

There is depth of field and serious antialiasing 8x8 samples, 8 width, Sinc.
Shading rate 0,25 (renderman thing), so 4x4 shading samples (I think, math is hard), hence the sharpness of the displacements and thats why hat has the peachfuzz effect .

Beauty render took 30 minutes, and so did raytraced AO pass (don't remeber how many samples I used). Rendered in 3delight2 for Xsi... my bad, Softimaaaageeeee. Xsi 7.01

- Materials. For face its miss_fastskin material with skin2 preset in 3delight property. Everything else has architectural material (because of the oren-nayar) or cook-torrance (because of the architectural bugs )
All clothes including hat are architectural with oren-nayar. The furry look of hat is the fractal procedural in displacement slot + some falloff effect,fresnel.incidence in xsi or whatever your application calls that.

- Skin details on a sculpt were mix of manual work and some sand/marble alphas. Thats how I always do it. I prefer to do lips for example with std brush rather than trying to find properly lit alpha. Ill do it manually faster. Out of curiosity I tried doing it the inflat way from photoes, but it sucked so I did it my way.

Pores are just several layers of various sands/concrete textures + some manual tweaking after. Like for example slight rows above his lips and such. Also I used some spray brush I think for some of them.

- I am unable to tell you how long it took. It was testing and learning piece. So I tried various aproaches for the skin. First in mental fail with even such desperate acts as using physical SSS (which btw is broken) or normal mapping (also broken). When it finally stopped rendering I switched to 3delight, had to learn from scratch but at least it finished render. It was redone quite few times so I lost count. This was the first time I used compositing, hair etc. So alot of learning here.

- There was some color correction and grain added in compositing.

-Stary piernik literally meams "old gingerbread", but it is a expression that means "old fart".

Piotr

[SurfingAlien]

I'll just say WOW!

big thumbs up

Cheers,
Alessandro

[bluepulse]

Beautiful work. Love the lighting

[_S9_]

Great work, diggin' the lighting and overall sculpt, there's some fine detail getting lost on the clothes and neck, maybe work some more on that, otherwise great work man