Try it out for yourself -- Free Head Scan available here
 

Introduction 
 

My name is Lee Griggs and I am a technical author at Solid Angle. My job mostly entails testing, documenting and creating tutorials for the Arnold plugins in Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, Cinema 4D, Houdini and Katana. All of the images here were rendered in camera with Arnold. I also used the alShaders by Anders Langlands for the skin shading effect in most of these images. The images above and below was produced by experimenting with the MCG plugin for 3ds Max. A friend told me that the image below looks like a cross between Rubber Johnny by Chris Cunningham and the Vic and Bob Masterchef sketch. I would have to agree! Someone else said this is what we will look in 1000 years time (it's usually after Christmas for me). With genetic engineering, though, who knows! 

Sculpting
 

I am inspired by the portrait work of such artists as Sebastian Krüger and quite enjoy deforming faces. Below are some caricatures I made using Mudbox. I just used the 'Grab' and 'Pinch' sculpt tools to push and pull the meshes into various shapes. I find it quite cathartic and amusing to contort faces. More examples can be found here.

 

 

Blockhead
 

This image came about from testing a deformer plugin for Maya called L3 Deformer. A tutorial on how I did it can be found here.

 

Some more examples using the same technique but with different shapes. More examples can be found here.

 
 

Rolling Shutter Experiments
 

Again, as part of my role in testing, I thought I would use some head scans to test camera Rolling Shutter in Arnold. This method is implemented by rolling (moving) the shutter across the camera area instead of the entire image area all at the same time. Some interesting (and disturbing) effects can be achieved when combining motion blur 'length' with rolling shutter.

 

 

Skin Shading
 

I usually use head scans from Ten24 to test skin shading in Arnold. More skin shading tests can be found here.

Skin Opacity
 

I thought it would be interesting to use some pattern textures to test a new Opacity attribute for the Skin shader in Arnold. I was very surprised when I saw one of these images featured on the front page of CNN with the headline "Could this be what our faces look like in the future?" I hope not!

  

Refractive Portraits
 

Inspired by the works of artists like Michał Mozolewski and Januz Miralles, I thought I would try and recreate this technique using Arnold. A tutorial on the process can be found here.

 

Volume Portraits
 

In this instance, I converted a scan to a volume, assigned a texture map to its density and then rendered it with Arnold.

 

 

Body Deformations
 

Lastly, more recently I thought I would try deforming some body scans. I think there is some potential here, but to be honest, I am having more fun deforming faces!

  

Take a look at more of Lees great work on his website :: http://leegriggs.com/