Firstly, I set a physical sky in maya, and the scene seemed too dark, so I just enhanced the light intensity later.

I also tried different backgrounds downloaded from the website. HDR maps need to be connected to Ai SkyDomeLight. For the following rendering, I increased Samples to be 4, it would take longer but could get a better quality result.

When I felt satisfied with the rendering for the still image, I created a camera and its aim in order to render a sequence of frames.

Here are render settings that I used:

When finishing sculpting and painting in Mudbox, I extracted texture maps under UVs & Maps. There are multiple types of maps to choose, I chose vector displacement map here because it contains more information than displacement map, so it might perform better when rendering with Arnold in Maya. Normal maps are commonly used in games.

We have some options for vector space. Because I just need to render it using Arnold, I just chose Absolute Tangent, it is a choice with the most flexible effect.

If we want to use the extracted maps as stamps or stencils used in Mudbox, Relative Tangent will be necessary.

World vector space is used for the undeformed and still objects such as environment. Object vector space is used for the undeformed objects usually.

Whatever the vector space is, we need to select the same one in Arnold material settings.

It is important to use 32-Bit for displacement maps.

Remember to tick on smooth target UVs, otherwise the rendering result will show errors.

The file which was sent from Mudbox was set in phong material as default. Therefore, we need to assign an Arnold material to the material, such as aiStandardSurface. We can edited the attributes and insert images in Hypershade window by using node graphs. For displacement maps, it is important to use raw colorspace without filters, as this type of images need to transfer accurate information.

Set the subdivision type as catclark with suitable iterations will improve the rendering result. A high number of iterations will result in longer export/render times.

I also tried to render it with a displacement map, here is the result:

For the background board, I downloaded the texture for website and used the normal map instead of displacement map or bump map.

I deformed the overall shape firstly in mudbox. For sculpting with better quality, I subdivided the origial mesh into a higher level and then sent the lower level with less polygons back to maya2020 directly in this step without any painting layers. If using maya 2018 or earlier version, we will have to export the model and load it in maya.

Before sending to mudbox for detailed sculpting and painting, I needed to unwrap the UV maps appropriately. It is important to assign new materials to each object and rename them to preventing from sharing one texture mapping afterwards.

I tried to generate tessellation meshs this time, however, I found the triangles did not work well with my selected vertical pattern.

Therefore, I still used quadrilateral mesh to work with and it did not take too many faces compared with tessellation mesh in this case. My highest subdivison level was 3 this time and I started to painted it by creating a painter layer. It is noticeable that simple blinn has no paintable channels so we need to assign to mudbox defalt material at first.

What’s more, I gave more details on assets:

To start with, I downloaded a 3D printable human head model(.obj). In maya, I reduced the number of polygons and made it live to retopologize manually. Then I was able to send it to mudbox to deform and add the details.

Here is my reference mask:

To complete the whole mask, I needed to create the assets such as horns, eyes and teeth. I just created simple topologies in maya and would send to mudbox for further editing as well.