The Butcher, the imaginary portrait of a serial killer. Done with Blender, Zbrush and Maya 2012 in conjunction with Mental Ray.
I’ve started from a loose polymodeled head done witch blender some weeks ago. I then did the sculpt in ZBrush, pushing the details not too far (7 millions polys) because I wanted to spent time experimenting with maya fast mi_sss shader.
I did a lot of different maps, almost 10 for the head itself (scattering layers and specularity), and some few others for the eyes, the teeth and the shirt. I’ve displaced the base mesh from level 2 to 5 (exporting the base mesh at level 2) and then applied a normal map for the high frequency details (subdivisions 5 to 7).
The lighting use 2 portal lights as main direct illumination sources. I’ve also used final gather with an image based environment node and eventually global illumination.
Finally, I did the compositing and some overpainting in photoshop.