This is my best work to date in terms of rendering.  The character is Lady Tavia.  I spent many hours understanding various things that can be tweaked in IRAY and how that interacts with the textures...  I decided to go for a hyper rich glossy magazine look.

The avatar was sculpted first in CC3 and then tweaked in CC4. Expressions were modified from Digital Soul. She has an entirely reworked skin texture set made in Skingen.  All in 4k. The hair was from DAZ, but retextured by me.  I usually try to use my own hair, but this fit. I made the dress in Marvelous Designer.  The background is a high resolution architectural photograph.




Playing with DOF and bloom from the ceiling lights washed out some of her features.  I am not certain I like the results as much as in the first shot.  I am also not certain why the dress's mesh went from level three smoothing to no smoothing.



In comparison, this is a native render made without using the IRAY extension, but all the internal bells and whistles turned on.  The only thing different about this vs. the first shot is a change of the necklace.  I didn't feel like spending an extra hour to undistort it from her head movement.