This is a photo realistic render I made for college, a portrait of my grandfather. I used some reference photos of him to make a modelled cage of his head in Maya, and then imported him to blender where I subdivided and sculpted him to put more defined detail into his face. I then imported a high res and a medium res from blender back into maya, and used normal mapping to put the detail from the high to the medium mesh to optimize render times.

To get realistic skin, I used the reference images with photoshop to design the base material, and created a specular (shiny) map and a few epidermal versions and used a subsurface scatter shader to compose these textures together. For lighting I used a HDRI dome which matched the photo background.

I hope the results speak for themselves!

I will later add some images of his mesh cage and any other data which was used to compose him. Click the image above for a 1080p widescreen version.