about the update on the tutorial
Maya has’nt changed that much in two years to make an “update” on this particular pipeline; though there have been some nice improvements overall.
There is now a new rendering mode for mental ray called “Unified sampling” it generates better and quicker results when rendering brute force renders (like ones using depth of field * indirect lighting), tweaking only a -quality- knob.
Final gathering has now a “Brute force” option for rendering, so that the artist doesn’t have to fiddle with min/max radius for FG points (at cost of increased rendering time)
Displacement shader in maya now fully supports vector displacement maps (wich zbrush 4r4 can now generate without zbrush-to-mudbox-to-maya shenanigans) pic below, related.
To improve overall look for a character, the lighting setup (wich this tutorial covers really briefly) can be dramatically changed (a blue and a red light, + a yellow fill). There can be also some tweaking of the material’s specular and gloss channels with a texture map.
Again, a great tutorial. Here is the object i am working on and you can see the difference between just a grab and the MR render.