thanks for the comments guys, much appreciated. you guys are right, the head could be pulled a bit higher at the top…simple fix for Zbrush! i’ll get to that in the next couple days.
i decided not to render displacements. the model went up 5 subdivision levels in zbrush, 3 million polys i think. so i brought the level 3 mesh into maya (level 4 mesh kept causing maya to crash on import) so i had a nice res mesh in maya and generated maps off of that from zbrush to get a base for the bump map.
here is a quick rundown, you can follow this tutorial as well to get you started. my little write up sort of assumes you know a little bit about the shader. if you dont’, you can learn from this tutorial http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=214189
i’m using the maya_fast_skin shader in mental ray for maya
my color map is input into overall color
my epidermal map is basically the color map desaturated and slightly toned blue. (not really the way it is supposed to be done, but it worked for me)
subermal color was set to a peach/beige color
my backscatter map is put into bacscatter section
my bump map is put into a bump2d node then dropped onto the bump of the shader.
my specular map gets put into primary specular color
both my keylight (spotlight) and IBL get put into the lights section of the SSS shader
under Lightmap i created a mental ray texture, samples were set to 512.
the mental ray texture was set to 3200 x 1200 b/c I renderd at 1600x1200.
in the lightmap check the ‘local’ checkbox and type in a path to a the file. most people, and if you read gpepper’s tutorial at the link above, will just put c:\sss but…for some reason i wouldnt’ get any sss unless i put c:\sss.tif
once that mental ray texture is created, i make a misss_fast_lmap. the mental ray texture i just created gets dropped into the Lightmap Write section of that and i also put a checkbox for Include Indirect Lighting so that the IBL is used for SSS. and again, drop my Keylight and IBL into the light sections.
and last, i go to the shading group of the fast_skin shader and drop that misss_fast_lmap i just created into the Light Map Shader under 'Custom Shaders'
and that is my shader, really simple if you look at it graphed out. no extra nodes, nothing fancy. just a lot of tweaking of my maps and the values of each attribute in the shader. hope that helps...if not, let me know and i'll try to be more clear