Portrait of a silent man by Patrick Eischen

Hair

Now comes the funny part: the hairstyle and the beard. I used Cinema's hair module for this job. I created two additional maps: an alpha map for the beard and one for the hair. Both maps were loaded into the 'Density' channel of the hair objects. Unfortunately the density map will not take effect in the editor view. It will only be visible in the final render. So I would suggest setting 'Display' in the 'Editor' tab to 'Hair Lines' if you have enough memory in your computer.

I created eyelashes and a wet layer for the eyes. For the eyelashes I selected an edge loop around the eye, created a spline from it and pressed the 'Add hair' button.

Rendering and Post Production

The render with Vreel skin shader and displacement took about 4-5 hours (1h 30min without displacement). I rendered the hair and beard in a separate pass and composed both in Photoshop. Further more I rendered an Ambient Occlusion pass and multiplied it over the picture. I wasn't happy with the way the eyes looked, so I copied parts of an eye photograph over the image. I finally did some color correction, applied Gaussian Blur to simulate DOF and added a grain layer. Here is the final image.

Thank you for reading my 'Making of'. I hope it was any help for you. For further questions you can contact me any time. Keep on rendering!

Patrick Eischen http://www.patrickeischen.com