Light Setup

After detailing, I went back into Maya and set up an underwater photograph back-plate, and
matched the lighting to it. The back-plate can be seen in Fig15.



The Volume light setup used Mental Ray physical light and the Mental Ray participating
Volume shader, applied to a cube. The spheres in front of the Volume light were partially
transparent, because of the visible streaks in the light cone. There was also a Fill light
from below, and an IBL-gradient in the scene.

The white sphere next to the head was not renderable and was used for the eye reflection
only.

Rendering

I re-imported the cage object models from ZBrush and smoothed them in Maya, by one
level. I used the Mental Ray architectural material for all shaders, as non-Mental Ray
shaders are known to not work well with the physical light. I applied the painted colour
texture and the normal map. The cavity maps went into the extra colour as a multiplier. The
re-imported and smoothed 1 or 2 level cage objects can be seen in Fig18.

Compositing

I rendered everything in Mental Ray in 2K resolution and 16-bit colour depth. Because

its a still image, there were several passes for the lighting. I then put them all together in

Photoshop. Some render passes: projected caustics and self shadow passes can be seen in

Fig19 - 20;

Volume light and Ambient Occlusion passes in Fig21 - 22;

and Specular and

Reflection passes in Fig 23 - 24.

I had to do some painting for the generated normal maps and on UV seams in the finished

image, where I had not ideally placed the position of the camera. I finally applied depth of

field using a Z-map, and used a Photoshop lens blur. The result can be seen in Fig25