Goal
Render a 3d model to resemble a sculpture.
This tutorial assumes you have an intermediate knowledge of Maya.

Open the model you want to render



Now, to create a background. Create a box



Select all the box edges and bevel. The box here is using 3 segments and a 0.1 offset



In the attribute editor (ctrl + a) for the box, turn off casts shadows, double sided, and turn on opposite. It may also be helpful to assign this background box to a layer set on reference.



Create a plane and angle it towards your model. This plane will be used as an area light after an ambient shader is assigned to it



Create a spot light and aim it at your model



It is important to make sure that all of your objects are inside the box. If the light is outside the box, you may have errors calculating final gather.



Things like SSS and photons take into account the scene size so you may have to adjust some values if your scene is much larger or smaller. For the sake of this tutorial scale shouldn’t matter much but here are some of my rough values.



And the unit size that I’m using.



That’s it for object setup. Now to assign shaders and adjust the lights.

Background
Create a lambert and assign it to the background. For my ambient color, I am using a ramp node to gain some variation. The ambient color assigned to the background will provide subtle lighting for final gather to calculate.




Fill Light
Create another lambert and assign this to the plane angled at your model. Assign a lightly saturated color and use a value over 1 in the value field. Here I use 2.5
This ambient plane will provide fill light for final gather to calculate.



Key Light
Select the light. I like to tint the color opposite of my fill light to add some vibrance to the render. Turn on ray tracing for the light.
Under Raytrace shadow attributes set the light radius to 50. This will cause the shadow edges to fade from sharp to blurry.
Set the shadow rays to 64 so the shadow edges aren’t too noisy.
Adjusting the penumbra angle and dropoff will soften the edge of the light shape.




Create a blinn and assign it to the model. Set the color to white, assign any needed bump map. Specular will need some tweaking based on the look that you want. I suggest keeping the highlight wide and not too strong.
I used a cavity map from zbrush in my diffuse channel. I connected outcolorR to diffuse.
I also used the cavity map for my specular color and tinted it blue.




You can add some depth of field to the render as well. To do this, in the hypershade under create mental ray nodes, under lenses, create a physical_lens_dof and assign it to the lens shader field under mental ray on your viewport camera.



Measure the distance from your object to the render camera and input that as a negative value.
If the area you want to be in focus is 164 units away, enter -164 in the plane field under the lens attribute editor.
Try different values for the radius and check your render. This will take some adjusting.



I recommend using draft quality when checking your renders. Turn on final gathering as well.



Try setting the test resolution lower during render test.



Here is the result from a blinn shader.
A SSS shader can be used to achieve a softer material look.
Experiment with different shaders.
This scene can be polished more (visual noise in the background, adjustments to the DoF level, title plaque for scale, etc.) but we’ve quickly been able to generate an acceptable look.



From here it is easy to move the lights around and experiment with colors.
Try adding a layer of noise to the image in photoshop to introduce some grain.

Some examples: