I grew up watching Star Trek on television reruns, as well as seeing Star Wars in the original theater release in 1977 as a child - and all those black and white movies that were on tv, they helped too 
As a kid, I used to stay inside a lot, so I spent time drawing my own science fiction characters and stories to pass the time. If I had blender back then, oh brother…
A new trick: paint a bump map on 50% gray and then extract the bumps to get the basis for a stencil - you can also add a dilate erode node or play with the Value slider in the Color Key node to change how much is included in the stencil versus the bump, and add an invert node to get the white on black version if needed.
I am using Blender at my new job to show product presentation in 3d for packaging that hasn’t been produced yet. At least I get to blend a little at work now :Dhttp://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=76082
Blending at work isn’t a bad thing! Very cool!
I am glad to - and I used the compositor a bit to get my render to look better before saving it out, so that was fun.
Here is a test of using particles for painting purpose: I set up an UV mapped image in Cycles, and set up a Hair particle system on my mesh. I used a simple cube as Object for my particles, and I painted the particles with weight paint. I then baked the Ambient Occlusion of my my mesh to the image, and used that image as a stencil to get stippling between two shaders with other image textures. The first seemed to be like rust once I added a bump node based on the baked image.
Great mats on #48!
Thanks Vicky, I am trying to get faster at making alternates to hand painting
Top notch vegetables my friend.
Thank you, it was a fun thing to work on for my friend. I haven’t revisited them lately, but I would like to do some more rigging soon after I follow some more tutorials.
So I get to share some photos of the products renders from the show this year. I used Blender 2.71 and Cycles for most of this stuff - I started the jobs with die lines in Illustrator, exported to PNG for textures, modeled and rendered in Blender, and then added the renders to Illustrator for the full banner designs.
My first year at this job in the art department, and I am the first person to apply Blender in the workplace.
Working out an illustration for work - so I am faking some stuff with 3d since I haven’t got a good camera 
Hey there Craig nice collection of work.
Thanks, I try - but painting is more my area
Yum, but that tomato looks like it has been in the bottom of the refrigerator a bit long! 
