Present standing

Treelady project

The tree lady is not yet UV mapped. Until now I have experimented on the model with only procedural shaders. The model has many errors such as triangular faces, extra vertices etc which may need to be corrected. If UV mapping is necessary it may be very difficult to UV map the bifurcating, twisting and overlapping branches of the model.

These are previous attempts for the ice project; there is lot more I desire for the final look.

Aims:
This was a raytracing assignment; It took me 14 hours to render one frame. Perhaps my quality settings were too high, or number of reflections/retractions/photons were too high.
I want to drastically reduce the rendering time, as well as get much better results than I have now.

I want to achieve more crispness and conrast... the diamonds should be brilliant, the background and environment should work to showing the tree lady more beautifully.

I want haze and fog in the background. It would be a night environment, so the colors would be deep blue hues and blacks, with tiny speckles of light as stars. I want to use icicles as a major contributing element to the background.

I found some very detailed models of snowflakes online, http://archive3d.net/?tag=Snow-flake
Here are the renders of how they look. They are presently in 3ds format, with lots of faces. If they don't import well in maya I may have to model some. I really like what I have found; these would work wonderful as earrings/ accessories.

Texture references. 

Snowflakes Image below is from http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/

Reference for diamonds

For the tree lady in forest setting; I have two roughly painted concept drawings.

One look target is extremely natural

One is extremely surreal.

For my project I want naturally shaded elements like the first image, lit so that it looks surreal like the second image. This project may require lot of modeling of creepers, flowers and leaves.

For the third face project; I have made an attempt before. 

In the reel critique by Pixar I was asked on trying to achieve a very realistic look and by using references. I would like to do that.