The workflow goes as follows; Designed and sculpted in Zbrush, Topology in Topogun, UV layouts in Roadkill, Texture painting and projections in MARi, lighting, materials, and rendering in Mental Ray for Maya. Various passes are exported and composite in Photoshop.
The workflow is linear and the render passes are output as 32-bit float images. The crushed black and over-exposure were achieved in post-processing. Two lighting scenarios were used, one with strong directional lighting and hard shadows and the other with soft light and plenty of secondary bounce lighting. The harsh lighting scenario was down-sampled, Gaussian blurred and finally screen-ed in Photoshop on top of the soft lighting scenario to over-expose the face while retaining visible lines and shadow breaks; This allows to retain structure and populate the face with interesting shadow patterns. An overlay-ed high-pass filter in Photoshop is used to get back some of the crispness lost with the Gaussian.
The background is a collage of different textures, two for the wall, one for the rain drops, one for the vertical structure, and one for the window. A Photoshop lighting filter was used to light the background.
Final touch-ups includes slight gamma correction, a color balance and a noise filter to unify the composition and reinforce the “filmic” look.
