Hi there. First of all I'd like to thank Lunatique, for his posing tips, since I believe he helped make this image a lot better, Ian Joyner for being born, and Paul Hormis, for being an excellent teacher. You guys surely helped me.

This is my photorealistic attempt of Hoshigaki Kisame from NARUTO, as I invisioned him to be in our real world.

Like my previous Zabuza image, I made this one with one objective, to make a good desktop wallpaper, that I'd like to have on(and It is the one i currently have set).
Knowing this, the making of the actual image was pretty fast. It took me 5 days to make it from start to finish, being the last 2 days pretty much for photoshop only.

The actual image was rendered at 1280x960 using Brazil, a pretty large image(each render time per layer was about 15 to 25 minutes), rendered in several separate layers. Just for shadows and occlusions I probably have 6 different passes.
It is incredible the ammount of detail the image loses from 1280x960 to 1024x768. I had to put a bit of a unsharp mask on the lower res one in order to restore some of the detail that was lost. A pity indeed.

One of the most difficult tasks that I came across was the hair, which was really tricky to pull of. The hair is about 50% texturing and 50% hairfx, using hairfx mainly for the hair highlights as guidelines.

This is my first model using Brazil as rendering system(with a mentalray for the mainlight shadow layer), and Zbrush too. Thought I'm using very little Zbrush on this since I'm still not confortable with it yet. I've used it mainly to make some more wrinkles in the cloth(which was modeled using clothfx and some actualy hand modeling as well) and to enhance some features on the face.

This model is probably the first case for me where people hate it or love it, never being 50/50. I personally like it a lot, specially being a closeup renderer. I know it has some problems, but i need to continue my other projects, and improve as I move on.

It taught me a lot. I loved making it.

Well, thats all for me. Hope you like it, and see you soon, I hope.