Another year, another elf!!
Without deadlines i just cant get anything done so I decided to do try to get into the exotique book and at the same time finsih off a really old character!
I used mainly xsi for the modelling (or rather sculpting), for the building i still use 3dsmax. I did some very few details in zbrush, mainly mouth and eyes. All the shading and texturing i did in max/photoshop and rendering in mentalray.
The hair is ornatrix - the REAL reason was to play around with this great plugin. Sculpting is a hell lot of fun but the rendering is painful! Finally i can appreciate our poor hairartists work properly.. . I tried all the shaders and mentalray approach and ended up using the expensive one. Im not totally satisfied with the result there but looking forward to investigate more!
Anyway! Its not perfect but im pretty very tired right now!
Hope you like,
seb
Lots of thanks also to mr subdivme, Allessandro Bonora and MArtin K for invaluable help!