Portrait Rendering Help

[BenHenry]

I am using 3ds max, and Vray, trying to get a realistic portrait rendering. What is the best and most realistic way?

[Neox]

Well its somewhat complex, you need a good model, Agood shader , good textures and good lighting and well to be entirely realistic, good hair, dof etc

What do you have already?

[BenHenry]

I've got a decent model, and a texture on top (ignore the horrible eyelashes/eyebrow)
http://benjaminleehenry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/current.jpgBasically, I just want to make a realistic render of her face as is. I've tried zbrush and have been really struggling with its rendering system. I've tried max, but it always ends up looking like crap. I really want to figure out how to render good sss, that looks like skin.

Also, I am really bad at hair and fur, do you have any suggestions?

[BenHenry]

Any ideas?

[meshiah]

turn off all lights and globals and just "paint" with one light at a time
with vray just throw 1 or 2 big area lights in the scene and that should be all you need.

[BenHenry]

Well, I really need help with shader setup in Vray rather than the lights setup. I've tried to mess around with Vray SSS2 all day but nothing looks good.
Like, how did he get such realistic skin here?

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=294159

[meshiah]

plety of video tuts on youtube and google.
make sure your scene scale is accurate. and the detail of skin is more about the spec and bump than anything else.

5 - Rendering Grapes in V Ray SSS2 - YouTube

[oobersli]

uh... how hard did you try using google? this is with like 5 seconds of effort. or do you want to be spoon fed the info/settings?

skin (http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?87167-V-Ray-skin-setup)

lighting (http://www.aleso3d.com/blog/?p=70)

[BenHenry]

I actually googled for like 2 hours. Weird.

Thanks for the posts though! this will help :D

[EarthQuake]

Honestly worrying about fancy lighting and shaders is premature at this point, you need to spend more time practicing modeling human anatomy, as there is a lot of room for improvement.

You could come up with a real nice rendering setup, but the quality of the model is going to hold it back. I think it would be a more productive use of your time to post this model in Pimping & Previews for critique.

[BenHenry]

Thanks for your crits EQ, I am going to go post a forum in the P&P section.
Thanks guys!
Also, messed around:
http://benjaminleehenry.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/render.jpg