Shaders and textures
At first, the character was painted with graphics tablet in BodyPaint 3d. The texture was meant to be neutral to any lighting and look handmade. It was then lit with standard maya lights, providing a deficient result:
The bad result is by reason that realistic lighting does not at all apply to the model. The textures look cartoon and thus the lighting must work in the same direction.
So the first thing to do was to adjust the light. The shadowmaps were tweaked to produce the most sharp and cutting shadows that was possible; either a surface was set to be in shadow or in light, without interpolation in between. The character’s shader was adjusted, having a samplerInfo node connect to a ramp, bound to the ambient light value. The ramp was given a set of alpha values simulating distinct tones of shade.
Both light and shader was then tuned to working together; with the shader giving of the distinct tones and the light simulating the actuall shadows.
From this point, it went easy to adjust the colorGain of the samplerInfo node in harmony with the spotlight, to produce more dramatic or moody lighting:
Rendertime = 3-5 seconds!