Dr. Manhattan on Mars

After completing the donut tutorial by Blender Guru on YouTube I wanted to re-create a panel from the comic book "Watchmen" written by Allen Moore in 1986. The panel as shown above depicts Dr. Manhattan staring off into the distance while sitting on Mars.

Re-creating this panel let me use the tool Daz3D for the first time which I used to create Dr. Manhattan starting from a base model of a man, this I believe was the right move to make as I was not yet comfortable with using the native sculpting tools within Blender. Within Daz3D I rigged and posed the model using the posing tools and the reference image.

From Daz3D I exported the model in .fbx format which allowed me to import the model into Blender and keep the textures. I then connected the textures to mesh using a principled BSDF node and the image textures. From there I used a MixRGB shader node to mix the base colour with blue to get the skin looking as it does in the reference image.

Once I had the character model in the scene I positioned him and set a plane down to act as the ground. I also modeled a rock by adding displacement modifiers onto a sphere to deform it. I then used PBR textures on the ground in a node setup similar to the one shown above and used a displacement map to get bumps on the mesh. 

Finally I added a area light to the scene because I thought it was too dark and added a stary sky hdri (high dynamic range image) to the world so that space wasn't a complete void and matched the reference image better. 

I rendered the scene in Cycles at 1200x1500px making the scene portrait and more akin to the comic panel reference image. 

In retrospect I have noticed some issues with this render.

- There is deformation where there shouldn't be any in the characters arm. This can be fixed next time by assigning weight to the bones of the rig properly.

- The ground normal displacement isn't quite right making the surface look jarring. Additionally the rock is not the same colour as the ground.

Furthermore I did no post processing with this image.