Lighting & Rendering

I turned on ambient occlusion, and created a spotlight with depth map shadows. For more realistic skin I gave a subsurface scattering appearance, by turning on the scatter radius in the material attributes.

I made a plane for her to stand on, but only wanted to seeher shadows. To make the plane blend into the background, I assigned a useBackground material, and turned the specular and reflectivity down. Then I used a circular ramp on the shadow mask so that her shadow would fade out towards the edges.

Below is the scene setup in Maya in Viewport 2.0, and the final render.