My name is Aspan Lohia, I am currently working as a Freelance 3d artist. I have been working with zbrush and Maya since 2004 after completing my diploma course from MAAC located at chandigarh. I belongs to Punjab and currently residing in Mohali city. I love 3D modeling, Texturing, taking the final renders, Working in Photoshop to make quality images. I've done a lot of things over time designing tattoos, T-shirt design, Concept Art, Character rigging, Lighting, Web site intro, Creation of characters from concept art. I have been enjoying my work in a  nutshell.

STEP 1: At the very first level of division i mostly use move tool to lay out a basic structure to carve details from. Clay buildup is used to attain required form and definition. later I use the standard brush to make transitions and sharpen the details. In my opinion it very helpful to stick with the move tool in the beginning's mostly use the clay brush or smooth deformer along with clay polish to finalize things up.

STEP 2: Bring the model to the lowest level of sub division and at this stage you make your model a-symmetrical so it looks more natural's use transpose tool a lot to pose my characters. Its simple to use it though the trick is painting your mask proper and setting the transpose line in conjunction with requirement.

STEP 3: After hours of sculpting the anatomy and details its a good idea to take a break and again look of anatomical mistakes or forms before taking it to the final stage. I use the Zbrush inbuilt retopology features if I haven't already made a neat topology beforehand. latest tools with Zbrush 4.5 like dynamic and q-remesher can be handy for quick retopology. generation the normal maps and displacement maps is a click away under Z-plugins. I use multi map exporter for the propose. For the displacement maps you can use adaptive mode to make it quick. for the UV unwraps I use Zbrush native unwrap feature mostly. Its a quick way but for something like low poly models for games I rather do the UV’s manually.

For the hair I used a very simple approach dint adjust anything else than hair length. Used the paint follicles tool.

STEP 4: Three point light is the best way to start setting up lights' used Maya portal lights to get a nice falloff. For the portal lights to work make sure visibility is turned on. Also check the use light shape check box. The intensity of the light is controlled by the intensity slider under portal light shader after it has been plugged in. Standard intensity slider won't work after shader plugged in. For the shadows I used simple ray trace shadows.

Open the hyper shade and skin shader input output connection click the shader engine node. The displacement map can be plugged in here.

In case the displacements fail to work and u see weird details on rendered model check for maya style alpha detection under preferences - rendering. it will work fine.

STEP 5: Maya approximation editor will determine how the displacements will be layed out on the rendered model. If the required amount of details on the rendered model are high, The max subdivisions will need to be high as well but generally it works fine with max of 5. But it will take longer render time with higher values. The camera zooming needs to cope up with the details being rendered so for that a small expression is used at the alpha offset value box. File1 in expression is name of the displacement file.

STEP 6: Skin shader settings can take a while to get to the required results but incase to want to go with standard settings go to the algorithm controls and try tuning it from there it will look pretty realistic with one click. I used desaturated diffuse map as the spec map plugged into over all secularity weight. To take it further you can plug a separate map into secondary spec color as per requirement.

STEP 7: Render settings are pretty simple as well, I used mental ray for this render. Made the adaptive sampling to 2 and turned on the final gather with little high values it depends on render time. Secondary ray diffuse of 1 makes the skin shading little more interesting as I have seen it tough it costs render time. I am using a linear color scheme for this render enabling the color management check box.

STEP 8: Lens settings I have plugged in a exposure simple node into lens shader from the mental ray lenses menu. Values used will give a washed out render but it will have more color information in it which can later be adjusted while compositing the image using gamma correction.