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Description
Been a long time my friends. 4 years to be exact.

drew the original, which you can see HERE

A lot has changed since the last render. I now run a software company that serves the industry I was once employed by. I made this render at my office in downtown San Diego.

I put a lot more work into this than it probably seems at first glance. Much like the subject of the image itself, it may not seem like I'm doing a lot, but the weight of the world is on my shoulders and I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.

A few notes:

There is absolutely NO photoshop, it came out this way. Not even for color correction.

Made in Maya 2014, rendered in Arnold. Yes, that's right, I use Arnold now, not mental ray. Arnold is simply better at doing the kind of rendering that I do. Except for glass, it sucks for that.

There were about 20 lights. All of them were linked individually to different objects, with varying degrees of diffuse and specular contribution. Working with a physically plausible renderer like Arnold becomes more of an exercise in manipulating lights themselves than the materials.

Rendering purely white characters with highlighting becomes a tricky affair, because it's almost impossible to prevent blowing out the highlights without making them look grey. This was a particular challenge in this image because of the Zurd on top. Notice the subtle edge rim effect on both of the characters (especially bottom ones feet and head)? The best way to create that effect was to multiply the specular values to something like 3.5 times normal, and use a fresnel. But by doing that, the top character completely blown out, since it's reflecting the brighter values of the white dome than the yellow ground plane. The one on the bottom was fine because the heart was blocking him from the white environment.

The solution was to create an actual environment light rather than a geometry dome emitter. This allowed me to seperate the direct and indirect speculars in the characters materials, so when I raised the indirect specular for that rim effect, it didn't multiply the white domes now direct specular. This prevented the top guy from getting blown out, but the white dome light is essentially a giant area light, so it multiplied render time by about 50. Worth it to get the look I wanted.

I ended up going through about 1,000 test renders, to get the look I wanted. It's little things you wouldn't notice unless I didn't do them:
Small bump map on the eye veins to disturb like 3 pixels just enough.
New material in the gaps of the bottom ones teeth has a 10% darker diffuse.
Ambient occlusions added to the color slots of characters and ground plane, not to darken the gaps, but to deepen the colors as they get darker.
Subsurface scattering at around 20% of the diffuse value on the characters, to give a very subtle soft look to them.
A jellybean in his butt , to smooth out the reflection on the heart that went through his legs.
A gradient on the edge of the ground plane so you can't see where it ends as a hard edge in a reflection

The bottom ones head was modeled from a perfect sphere, and later when the mouth was extruded I put a new sphere in its place to pull the vertices back into perfect sphere shape.

The two main reflection cards were elipses , but Arnold doesn't let you scale a round area light in a non-uniform direction. So what I had to do was scale a rectangular area light, and then apply a circular ramp to the color of the light. This made it so the area lights matched the shape of the reflection cards. I did this because I wanted those reflections in the heart to be very bright, but not blow out the characters. The cards were only visible in reflections, not specular or diffuse, and so I could use the light to control that.

I could go on for days about the subtleties. Just enjoy the render.

Here'es the full viewport gallery

Bonus gif

Tacos

Description
Been a long time my friends. 4 years to be exact.

drew the original, which you can see HERE

A lot has changed since the last render. I now run a software company that serves the industry I was once employed by. I made this render at my office in downtown San Diego.

I put a lot more work into this than it probably seems at first glance. Much like the subject of the image itself, it may not seem like I'm doing a lot, but the weight of the world is on my shoulders and I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.

A few notes:

There is absolutely NO photoshop, it came out this way. Not even for color correction.

Made in Maya 2014, rendered in Arnold. Yes, that's right, I use Arnold now, not mental ray. Arnold is simply better at doing the kind of rendering that I do. Except for glass, it sucks for that.

There were about 20 lights. All of them were linked individually to different objects, with varying degrees of diffuse and specular contribution. Working with a physically plausible renderer like Arnold becomes more of an exercise in manipulating lights themselves than the materials.

Rendering purely white characters with highlighting becomes a tricky affair, because it's almost impossible to prevent blowing out the highlights without making them look grey. This was a particular challenge in this image because of the Zurd on top. Notice the subtle edge rim effect on both of the characters (especially bottom ones feet and head)? The best way to create that effect was to multiply the specular values to something like 3.5 times normal, and use a fresnel. But by doing that, the top character completely blown out, since it's reflecting the brighter values of the white dome than the yellow ground plane. The one on the bottom was fine because the heart was blocking him from the white environment.

The solution was to create an actual environment light rather than a geometry dome emitter. This allowed me to seperate the direct and indirect speculars in the characters materials, so when I raised the indirect specular for that rim effect, it didn't multiply the white domes now direct specular. This prevented the top guy from getting blown out, but the white dome light is essentially a giant area light, so it multiplied render time by about 50. Worth it to get the look I wanted.

I ended up going through about 1,000 test renders, to get the look I wanted. It's little things you wouldn't notice unless I didn't do them:
Small bump map on the eye veins to disturb like 3 pixels just enough.
New material in the gaps of the bottom ones teeth has a 10% darker diffuse.
Ambient occlusions added to the color slots of characters and ground plane, not to darken the gaps, but to deepen the colors as they get darker.
Subsurface scattering at around 20% of the diffuse value on the characters, to give a very subtle soft look to them.
A jellybean in his butt , to smooth out the reflection on the heart that went through his legs.
A gradient on the edge of the ground plane so you can't see where it ends as a hard edge in a reflection

The bottom ones head was modeled from a perfect sphere, and later when the mouth was extruded I put a new sphere in its place to pull the vertices back into perfect sphere shape.

The two main reflection cards were elipses , but Arnold doesn't let you scale a round area light in a non-uniform direction. So what I had to do was scale a rectangular area light, and then apply a circular ramp to the color of the light. This made it so the area lights matched the shape of the reflection cards. I did this because I wanted those reflections in the heart to be very bright, but not blow out the characters. The cards were only visible in reflections, not specular or diffuse, and so I could use the light to control that.

I could go on for days about the subtleties. Just enjoy the render.

Here'es the full viewport gallery

Bonus gif

Tacos