Arthur Morgan image set W.I.P

Hello Patrons

A little while ago I started to work on another project featuring our cowboy Arthur Morgan from RDR2. The goal of this project was to render vegetation and day lighting more realistically, also making a nice nude render of Arthur of course.

This time I was going even further and used effects that can hold up with studio quality assets which usually are archived when running on big workstations such as servers with multiple CPU's.

Rendering on a "consumer PC" is always challenging, you have limitations that you need to work with and sometimes it's frustrating. Once you get used to the limitations of your hard/software you can be creative and try out new things.

Such as for the cropped picture above. I finalized the new Skin Shader Version 9.2 for my Character models, this Shader features micro skin details and realistic refraction. The final result of the Shader varies depending on how good the "source" files (Character model and it's textures) are. 

Here is a little sneak peak of what the shader looks like when zooming very close to it:

Note that this image is captured directly from the render engine and there's no post processing or whats however to archive this result. 

If you sticking around on my patreon page for a while then you may saw my posts about creating new materials such as skin Shaders and other stuff from scratch. This is actually a big part of my journey as a 3D designer since in my opinion this is very necessary to research in order to create better and more realistic images - even with software that wasn't meant to get used for this in the first place. As video games improve their quality the more harder it get for me as an artist to keep up with the companies but at the same time I'm happy to see that we are moving forward in the right direction.

Remember the first 3D games from the late 90's to mid 2000's? Characters were made out of few polygons and used flat shaded textures to archive their look. Back in the days you may didn't saw them close up on blurry CRT's anyways but nowadays when we hitting 4K in resolution and pixel count four times the size, you can see every detail and this is very stunning.

As for the image in this post, the character model has over 700.000 polygons (including his gear) just to make sure there are no jagged edges or other artifacts that can hurt visual performance.

The tree which may seem "unimpressive" since trees are basically everywhere (depending on your location) uses high complex materials to make the light scattering through the leaves possible. Also the bark of it is completely tessellated ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation_(computer_graphics) ) which helps with visual greatness but hurts rendering performance at the same time. If setup correctly you can get amazing results!

So here's a quick overview what's actually used to create this image so far

- Full scene global illumination

- Full scene anti aliasing (MSAA)

- Sub Surface Scattering (SSS) for the character model

- Fuzz Shader (NURBS) for the characters chest hair

- Tessellation

- DOF (depth of field)

Alright folks that's it for the first. I hope you look forward to the final result and wish everyone a nice day.

~F0