Thanks everyone. The hair was nothing revolutionary. It was using the Melena set up to convert the XSI hair to curves, then the curves to strands. It wasnt fast. It's just a lot easier to groom that way, using the built in hair system. Especially using a lowrez hair set up and copy styles to a highrez set up. So that is what you saw on the behind the scenes.
The basic groom was combed the old school way, then layers of ICE manipulations on top of that to get more variation, color dynamics etc. Dave Barosin helped in getting the hair dynamics to work with a pretty ingenious set up. Vince built the muscle setup which I'm not really able to comment on too much. He handed a cache of that geometry over to me, and I had a skin simulation stage that is basically a verlet set up that conforms to the muscles. It was used mostly for the body, but was also used sparingly on the face. (the stuff you see in the behinds the scenes is an embarrassingly old test scene, but you can see the verlet wrinkles) The face was largely done with maps to drive deformation at render time. Based on the compression and stretch of the underlying geometry. Rendered in Arnold. With Keven Ives and Thomas Bardwell handling most of the shading and lighting.
