Introducing Lara Croft *

Conception: Lara: It's taken you this long to get around to me? Me. Lara Croft. Seriously?

Method:
XPS: Load model, apply pose and tinker, save pose. 
Blender: Copy and paste model to a layer with setting. Import pose, reposition. Adjust render, camera and lighting rig parameters. Check for inconsistencies.

Commentary: Ah.... Lara. The very character XPS was originally designed for. Why now? Well... Lara has been on the backburner for a very long time. My creative flights of fancy means I don't stick to a self-conceived project very well and do as I please. Often there would just be things I wanted to do so never quite got round to Lara. Then there's my own aesthetic preferences. It took me a very long time to come across a Lara model which really fit my conception of the character. There would always be something just a bit off, so Larreks' version is probably the one which suited me the most. I probably have more fondness for the later Lara design prior to the reboot; it was the older Lara who made her way to a non-game magazine cover (The Face).

There were a few issues I experienced though. Mainly the lack of knowledge to use light maps and environment maps; previously the issue was seen with Cammy. One particular mesh and texture was troublesome which can be seen close up but not far away. Also did something a bit different with the glasses lens as well with the node set up and decided not to use the actual diffuse map, but adapted the node to use a Diffuse, Transparent and Translucent BDSFs instead. Comes out slightly see-through as was my intention. Quite pleased with that actually. Now if I can just sort out that one particular mesh and texture. There are minor things I could adjust as well as sorting out a few aspects of the meshes in Blender, but it should be okay for the most part.

With pose tinkering I started the adjustments and then hoped that the sunglasses had a bone. Thankfully they did which allowed me to adjust them to give this look. Simplistic adjustment on my part, but I need simple stuff as health issues are ongoing.... 

Final note, this particular background doesn't seem to add greatly to the render time (rendering as I type this). Perhaps the lack of complexity is the reason why.

Credits:
Lara Croft model courtesy of Larreks (additional credits on the model link)
Pose by BubbleCloud
Node set ups:
Basic node set up courtesy of DragonLord720
Cloth node set up by DragonLord720
Eye node set up by Hypster83
Skin node set up by Hiddenus
Tools: 
Blender 2.79
XNALara Posing Studio 11.8
Assets/Copyright:

Render time: 58m 18s - quite surprised about this actually.
Resolution: 1080x1920
Sampling: 4096
Other info: N/A

Date of completion: Set up - 25th December 2017; Rendered - a December 2017

P.S. Blender quibbles strike once again. Scraps. Not having much luck with the last two renders. Think I'll do something else before trying to correct these....