After this, I opened up the Environment and Effects window, assigned the mr Photographic Exposure Control and tweaked the settings a bit (Fig.16). And then it was rendering time.


Apart from the beauty render I usually render an ambient occlusion pass to catch some of the smaller details. There are plenty of tutorials covering this already so I'm skipping that for now (Fig.17 - 18).


When everything was rendered I brought the image into Photoshop for some final tweaking. I tend to over-complicate the compositing part, so this time I made an effort to keep it simple. I tweaked the levels of the beauty render, multiplied the AO, added a haze effect by dotting with a soft white brush and added a cool photo filter (Fig.19).

Final Words

As a generic lighting setup I was certainly happy with the result, but there's plenty of room for further tweaking. I would like to continue working on the materials and, of course, improving the models themselves by sculpting lots more (Fig.20 - 22).


Thanks for reading and I hope you learned something!

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