Rock Buddha

Rence writes:

I wanted to take my renders to the next level in my personal work. I was always happy with my work but the renders always had that ‘digital’ feel. I think I found the sweet spot on the lighting/coloring on this one after quite a while of tweaking. Very simple shader, using a rock map from Poliigon.

The material is as basic as a Diffuse mixed with a Glossy. The rest are all maps. A Color map driving color of the Diffuse shader, Gloss map driving Roughness of the Glossy shader, Normal map driving the normals of both shaders and a Reflection map driving the Factor of the Mix shader.

There is one mesh light in the scene. The background environment is solid black. The cameras have a 55mm Focal Length with a full sensor. For the depth of field I just set up the distance as far as I wanted and tweaked the radius until I liked the DOF.

I spent some time playing with the Color Management settings using the film emulation along with tweaking the Exposure and Gamma values. Rendered in Blender Cycles with 500 samples and a little bit of post also done in Blender like film grain, chromatic aberration and color balance.