gettting the best out of shading.

Rockley Bonner

I hope this is this is right sub forum for this....

Im trying to get the most realistic rendering possible. this one is with z brush and some photoshop retouching but it still looks cartoonish. Ive tryed mental ray but I cant export the mesh without z brush crashing to hell (my comp has 2gig).

any help is apreciated!

Ruz

you could try decimating the mesh before export. seems to be standard practice now

Snader

I think there are only 2 solutions (but I'm likely wrong):
-reduce the polycount
-find a friend with a tough PC you can use.

cryrid

Would displacement+normal maps not help?

LateWhiteRabbit

Reducing the polycount with Decimation Master (included in ZBrush) or something similar is really the only way to go.

Then you can get it into your modeling program to make bakes, renders, etc. I have a beast of a PC, and even my rig can't handle the many millions of polys a high detailed character sculpt is being brought over "as is" into Max.

If you can bake it down to displacement and normal maps on a low poly, you can render in something like Marmoset.

ceebee

I'd also recommend decimation or a low poly + normal/displacement maps. I've been doing a few busts like these using Mental Ray and just normal maps and they're quite fun. Using the maya_fast_sss shader.

megalmn2000

For the specular map, I would inverse the color of the diffuse (the skin should looks blueish). From what I see, your specular is over saturated, making the shading unnatural due to the fact that it use the same color as the diffuse (orange). This article should help you understand better, as it did for me : http://www.manufato.com/?p=902

tristamus

megalmn2000 wrote: »

For the specular map, I would inverse the color of the diffuse (the skin should looks blueish). From what I see, your specular is over saturated, making the shading unnatural due to the fact that it use the same color as the diffuse (orange). This article should help you understand better, as it did for me : http://www.manufato.com/?p=902

Indeed, that is the BEST thing ever written on spec maps, IMO.