This was an attempt at character photorealism, perhaps the most difficult form of Cg realism.
I wanted to render a full character, including hands and feet, not in flat GI lighting, but strong directional lighting which gives rise to the subtle hue and tonal variations that 2d artists are used to portraying, but is very difficult to do in 3d, and it required the setup of a lot of lights and luminous 'light boxes' with various colours and light blockers.
This is pretty much a clean 3d render, by which I mean there is no 'paintover' in photoshop, since that would defy the point of the exercise. The photoshop work consisted of levels, colour balancing, and dodge to pick out highlights.
The hair was rendered in several layers/passes and strategically blended together in photoshop, again with some dodge tool to pick out highlights. I pretty much had to model every hair strand with 2 point poly chains for complete control over the shapes.
Modeled in mudbox and rendered in Lightwave.
Big thanks to Steve Worley and his fantastic Lightwave plugins (Sasquatch, G2, Fprime) without which this would not have been possible.