I used the remesh often, to sculpt, then I decimated it to relatively low levels. I then in truespace filtered near vertices. I used the rock sculpt tutorial I did to clean up and add details how I wanted it (carve tool mostly).
I baked the cavity from the high def mesh to the low, also Normal and AO. I used those in the D3D shader for some pretty effects.
In blender I later then used the nodes with the passes I rendered to create a fusion of darker shadows, more AO effects (really nice) and the like.
A trick to fill out the shaders was using an angle biased reflection with the same texture as the background.
I used a main key light, a purplish fill light, and a warm redish rim fill and a blueish fill on the other side.
Shadows are sharp, minus the purplish fill light, which are soft.
All in all, my passes worked flawlessly, and the only hard part was TS handling the high amount of poly's. In this case making layers matte passes may have to by my workflow, or another. I wish there was a bounding-box option to view objects for manual work and things.
But all is well that ends well, this was a fun little project, applying my own plugins to my own workflow based on tutorials and Blender's power.. it was great fun.
I think.. I'll make a turntable animation for youtube later on in my free time...
And well.. doing this in my alkathosk world concept really inspires.
Once I release the pass script, when finished, then I'll make some workflow compositing tutorials, so you don't have to render much and just work on the arty side of things.
Passes (using my D3D pass script, developed by Stan and me, with help from Prodigy for the shader - now my soon to be released D3D Ultra Shader)
Beauty
Matte
Depth
Ao
Specular
Shadow
Wireframe
