Thank you so much. Stan caricature is my personal favorite too 
A lot of credit goes to Sebastian Krueger for his amazing+fun painting, of course.
A shame I could not finish the Predator bust on time as well. I will, sometime soon.
About the rendering, I’ll be sharing my settings (shader and lighting) sometime this week. It’s quite simple, since I didn’t have a lot of free time to do a better research and tests.
The Stan render was the longest, about 1 hour 10 minutes, because I just didn’t optimize the scene any bit. I just imported the highres model at 3.something million polys and rendered it using Mental Ray+Final Gather.
The other two were faster. About 25 minutes each frame.
My machine is a Dell dual quad core 2.2 with 8GB of RAM and a QuadroFX 3500.
About turning on indirect illumination on the fastSSS shader, I did it for Stan, not for the other 2. Stan was also the only one rendered with final gather. I used one single area light and about 3-4 white planes for lighting and reflections.
Pumpkinhead and the TRex were rendered with fastSSS but without final gather. I used 3-4 area lights on each. That made a lot faster to render but didn’t have the global illumination feel of Stan render.
I didn’t use any HDRI. It’s all area lights and/or white planes, in a very dark grey environment, to give the studio light feel. When I use HDRI, I normally leave final gather in charge of the lighting. I normally don’t turn on the option that makes the HDRI to emit light, but it all depends because I did use it in some of my past works.
I hope the information helps and thanks again for stopping by! Lots of talented people who I really admire posted here. So, back to you all, my friends!
-Kris
