House elf

Artwork Finished Projects
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Final_elfo_.jpg1024×640 105 KB

Hi guys, this is my last image. I made the image as a gift for a friend.

I started following the Wes Burke tut, but once the modelling was finished, I decided to go further and create a complete scene, try complex sss shaders and node materials and other stuff like that.

The most complicated part was properly set up the skin shader, since I don’t like the skin presets. I made a lot of tests with node materials, and even if I’m pretty happy with the results, I feel that still needs more work, specially in the backscatter layer.

The polycount is about 680k, and the final image (1920x1200) took about 50 minutes to render in my PhenomII x3 @2.86gHz. This time probably could be better, since there are 5 area lights with a very high sampling (between 8 and 16 samples each one). If I decide animate it (at least, I want to practice some facial rig and skinning, and if I have some time I’ll create a short video with the result), I’ll change the lighting to a cheaper set up. The quick post production was made in PS

C&C are always welcome

Edit: hi res here

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This is sorta like the scene i want for my elf but it’s so hard to do test renders when 50% takes an hour haha but i think what you need for this is some specularity, his skin is very diffuse but good good, i like the rock wall how did you do that??

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Thanks for the fast comment. Originally, the skin has more spec, but i didn’t like those brilliant skins, so I decide to decrease it a lot… but is true, maybe it was too much.

The rock wall is a subdivided mesh with a displace modifier. If I made the famous video and decide to conserve the wall, probably must bake the normal map in a lowpoly mesh, because actually this is the heavier mesh of the scene. The texture is a really huge map from Arroway, but I’m pretty sure that you can find in CGTextures very nice rock textures to use