help with rendering, keyshot

Middnight

hey guys, 

been using zbrush for a few years now, but never really got into rendering. wanted to change that with this character, but as you can see bellow,
The result isen't that good was hoping some people could aid me on getting the skin and cloth ( mainly those) a tad more realistic with some advice.

thanks alot

musashidan

You could start by using a skin material. Use the human skin translucent material preset and go from there. If using KS bridge from ZB then there is an strange bug when applying the skin mat. You have to make sure that the subtool has a flat material in ZB before sending to KS.

Also, for a portrait render you want to set up interesting lighting. I usually use a high contrast hdr  with desaturated or little colour, a low intensity and a 2 to 4 point lighting setup.

And the eyes are probably the most important aspect of a portrait. They often make or break the interest of the image.

Middnight

thanks for the input, I tough i had used the skin shader, but apperantly not :P put a bit more time in it, heres the result.

any advice on how to make it beter or what to focus on on next project? thanks alot

pior

Your render is already 100% realistic for all materials (metals, skin, fabric). From there the only ways to make it look better will be related to the design of the asset itself, your lighting setup, and your choice of lens. To improve these you'll have to study both character design principles (anatomy, color theory, visual libraries) and real-life photography.

In other words there really is nothing technical left to learn here. That's a good thing ! The sky is the limit.

Middnight

thanks mate, really kind words, made my day

musashidan

Aside from what Pior advised you can push the eyes more. As I mentioned above, they are probably the most important aspect in a portrait. Adding lashes and modeling the caruncle as separate geo is a start. Also, as both myself and Pior mentioned, the lighting. Study real world portrait lighting from photography and the master painters. Rembrandt lighting is a popular and effective set up. The lighting you have now looks like the default hdr and is not suitable as interesting portrait lighting.

After that, post work in PS can really push the image further. 

musashidan

Middnight said:

thanks mate, really kind words, made my day

I think what @Pior meant by 100% realistic is that the Keyshot materials are physically accurate shaders with little or no tweaking required.

Middnight

well he said there is nothing technical left, so thats pretty nice to hear ;P 
thanks for your input again aswell mate, gonna try to make some eyes and get a bit more in lighting 

pior

Yeah what I mean by that is that indeed, your materials are realistic and so does the rendering. That's about 10% of the job taken care of - and the remaining 90% consist of actually designing the shot.