BREAKDOWN

Here's a breakdown of the process and my reflections for those curious.

I started by finding references for the tone and overall look. For this round in both stills and render, I wanted to push lighting to extremes. On one end I use it to push form shape and in the other, use it to accent shape and texture.

After find a refrence for tone and look, I explored Epic's Metahuman platform, diving deep into customizing and modifying its base shaders in UE5. With a base already set, there was room for tons of custom work with textures and integrating high-res 3D scans.

Next, I approached lighting like an actual studio shoot, dialing my camera settings to the desired real world equivlent. Which, like any shoot, resulted in all kinds of shots, from bad to okay, and finally, four images I loved.

With these images and video rendered out, I did some compositing in Nuke, building a base look across all four pieces. Then, in Photoshop, I approached the renders like an actual retouching project, using Nuke's exports and a retouching workflow to explore looks and finally build the final images.

With the rendered sequence, that was all done within Nuke and DaVinci Resolve. Using the acesCG render passes Unreal gave me, I had a ton of wiggle push and pull details and create new passes. In this case, I pushed more details with the eyes and the highlights of the skin.

After a wild weekend of learning, breaking Unreal, and some manual love, I am blown away by what I could achieve in half the time of a usual renderer.
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Will it replace other renderers? I don't think for established workflows, but for fast iteration of complex scenes on a quick turnaround if you can deal with the kinks that come with dealing with a game engine.