Hi,

That's a some kind of ICE photon mapping. For picture on top, I've added ICE point cloud for additional bounces. Finally it's rendered together with only one classic light + point-based color bleeding. It's very basic for now, but it doesn't requires almost any additional scene preparation (baking to maps, so on). Whole rendering process takes about 7-10 minutes on 2 core 3delight, on 1365x768. ICE part is just non-simulated, immediate ray-casting, no any dart-throw sorting or other advanced stuff. Particles are aligned to surface normal and default, one-side color bleeding is used, so algorithm catches only a 'far-away' ones.

... and that's how it's look like when "sortbleeding" is enabled - much better shadows.. Now it's about 14 min on 2core, for 1365x768. Taking in account, all trash of particles I've supplied as 'photons', it's really amazing how 3dl handles with this.

I'll definitively work more on these 'ICE photons'.

Wow good, wouldn't have thought that ICE and 3dl could work together so tightly.

Yet another WIP, now with almost all knobs on. Subsurface scattering, hair, DOF, particles, a lot of geometry. Character (including hair) is rendered in one go, I think it's first time I was been able to use the same lighting setup for everything. Rendertimes for 1536*2048 with 2 core 3delight and a weak machine: about 40 minutes for character (a lot of this goes to raytraced AO), 7 mins for dust/particles, 6 mins for ground.
Of course that's just wip, there's a tons changes to do.

Take a look at 1152*2048

Holy sh*t

Nice rendertimes for that resolution with a weak machine and only 2 cores!
And quite a nice look aswell

Thank You.... all

A few variations here. My choice is 'half-profile', no need for de-symmetry work on face
Back on the topic, lighting is a light rig with about 30 lights with DSM, plus raytraced AO on some places. I've used Fabricio Chamon's ambient lights script for taking the lights from HDR image. It's really easy to adapt this script...

big one

That's just fraking awesome!

Impressive as always! I agree the half-profile looks better and not just because of the symmetry but looks like a slightly less forced pose. I like the suit very much also...

Agree, impressive, and like really mush the '50 scifi style you use.

Great job as usual! I really like the overall design of the character, especially the suit. Very nice renders!