So onto the next project this time I have a 'grand plan' in mind which should hopefully bring many elements all together in one scene. I'm thinking BIG this time so it will take a while and no doubt I will learn a lot.

I plan to sculpt some characters in Zbrush so I've been working through some more tutorials and I must say I am loving this time around. Everything is coming together much faster and I am finding the tools easier to work with. My tablet is much more fluid to use now as well!

Here is WIP screen shot from my latest sculpt.

Demon Head WIP #1

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After quite a few hours exploring various render setups to try and get decent render passes for my Bruton render I was up against a bit of a brick wall.

All of the rendered elements out of 3ds max were too dark, as if they had a gamma of 1.0 or less.

I was lucky enough to get a response from a user on the CG Society forums who explained that when rendering elements as a 32bit format such as .HDR or .EXR they need to output with gamma set to 1.0 whereas when rendering out 8bit or 16bit formats like .BMP or .JPG you need to have gamma set to 2.2 in 3ds max!

I also found .EXR is a great format in that it can contain all the render elements as separate layers in the single file! Very handy indeed, when compositing  in photoshop. However a plugin is required, called ProEXR

Heres a link to the forum post 

Heres a link to ProEXR

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I finally got around to finishing off my Bruton project. I'm pretty happy with the end result however I am still having a lot of trouble with render passes in 3ds max so I didnt complete as much post production as I would have liked. I'm really happy how the lightning turned out in the end though

I learnt a lot about lighting in this project so I'm sure that will help a lot with future renders!

Heres the first render, i'll render out a few other shots once I can suss out the render passes properly.

Full resolution pic here 

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