This image is 3 years old, but it got onto the front page at one point, so why not submit it finally? Took me long enough to get up the guts to do so...
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Mikha is part human, part spirit, a fallen noble and an exiled warrior from a lost world. His true nature can only be seen by a few-- call them lucky or insane-- and even he is slowly forgetting what he once was as the weight of the mortal world settles over him. ...And he's a pain in the butt to paint because his skin tone is bizarre and his eye color can't be produced by computer screens, but I did my best. This character is one I've had for many years, I draw him often.
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Created in 3dsMAX, no plugins-- hence the lack of eyebrows (I tried to zoom way in so nobody would notice). I made the eyelashes manually with the Snapshot tool, copying a bent cone many times along an eyelid path and then randomizing the result. The face is part of a whole head, made with subd modeling. The eyes were made with two spheres, one with a bulge for the cornea, one with a dent for the iris.
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The eye material is designed to react well to different levels of light, though I cannot for the life of me get many of the map types to interact properly with photometric lighting, so it's all just normal lights. The iris material has at least a dozen different maps in it, a lot of nested Mix maps, Gradient Ramps and Falloff maps-- special thanks to Julian_J's very excellent iris textures, I used one for a mix mask.
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This image was used in Leigh's CGnetworks article "Women in CG" in Nov 2003. (she used a couple other images of mine also, and mispelled my name to be the same as hers, which made me chuckle)
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Tell me what you think! It's an old image and my techniques have already improved, so it doesn't need to be technically picked apart, but I'm interested in overall artistic impressions.