Lighting + Shading / Stanford Dragon

This week in preparation for BFX I am going to be focusing on Lighting and Shading, primarily in Mental Ray, as I have had no luck with Renderman for Maya 2016 Ext 2.

I'm starting off with some models from The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository. These are pretty well known models and are used a lot for lighting and shading experiments.
There are a lot of really interesting examples of rendering out there, two I liked were here (glass) and here (subsurface)

 I'm starting out basic with these but this week I'm planning to look into reference images, and creating similar results, making use of HDRIs, and include some nuke compositing techniques to add to final look of what I'm making.


I like to do these horrible colours from lights to initially set up the strength and where exactly the lights are focused.

Here I've got some basic materials set up and have started tweaking the lights.



I did some experimenting with Mental Rays glass materials, the result was nicer than I expected but the shadow is not very appealing or true to life.



These setups were all incredibly basic, tomorrow I'll be focusing more on more in depth shading networks to improve the results. 

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