Final Year Project -IP MAN 2 character sculpt #Update 2

This week i haven't sculpted more on my character, but I have been researching and testing on using the Vray render engine. I was following a tutorial on using the free Infinite Lee Perry-Smith head from infinite-realities, it includes the ztool for the head, which contain all the subdivisions, you could render extra map or make your own textures on it. It also contained a normal map, displacement map and a overall colour map, as well as an .obj of the model.

Following the tutorial i produced these images.

Displacement map off

Displacement map on

As you can see the image with the displacement map has the model look puffier, especially it's more noticeable on the ears. Out of the two this image took approximately 3 hours to render, where as the one without displacement took 15 minutes. Looking at both results they look more or less the same, but from my limited knowledge of displacement maps, the displacement map should add in extra details to the face, ie skin pores and wrinkles to the face, but instead it has increased the scale of the model. Even though the model itself is about 8000+ tris, there should be suffice geometry to make the displacement maps work, even the geometry on the ears were quite dense.

I think further research into displacement might be needed to achieve or even a better result than my test. Things that I learned from using vray, if im correct, that the fastSSS shader can produce quicker and use Global Illumination to render than Mental Ray. Use can also use just an overall colour map only to produce a lot maps for the shader slots within the shader, with the use colour correction. Of course normal map and displacement is needed to achieve a depth of realism. HDRI maps are also important as they mimic a real life environment when rendering.

Until the final stage, this is limited knowledge of Vray.