Nicely done… great concept!
Very nice!!!
Awesome work … love the concept. It must have taken an awful amount of time to render. Can you share your system specs used for rendering this image?
Awesome!!! Great to see this finished, and it was definitely worth the wait! Fantastic concept, great composition, and wonderfully rendered. Excellent!
I feel the same way with some works, I began but I can’t finish because I feel don’t looks good, but you surpass that stage, and you simply finish and reach a excellent result in all sense, I like much this image and this give me much motivation!
I leave my point exchange.
Thank you for all the nice comments. Yes, I kind of planned more details and to make it much better, but I thought if I didn’t finish it now I would never finish it.
@asprao - My desktop machine is nothing special - 4 core AMD CPU and 8GB RAM. Although it has an NVidia GPU I couldn’t use it because of SSS and Volumetrics, so I just rendered the final image overnight on the CPU, I think it was 6 hours or so.
For an artist, his art never get finished cos if its finished… then the artist don’t have anything to improve. thats why we have to settle at one point or the other. but in your case u have created wonderful art, especially the composition and realistic look. Grate work.
regards,
Tejas.
what is an AO pass? and how did you get the grain to be that much a part of the solid shape? i always get it just the smooth material. i assume the woot textrue is just the bump mapping from the texture?
may i get a hd copy to use as my desktops sir?
it’s cery nice
Great fantasy and well implemented!!
Awesome work
Thank you for the lovely comments 
AO pass is Ambient Occlusion. It’s a quick approximation of which areas are in shadow if there was no direct lighting. I’ve used it above as a nice way to quickly show the model geometry without any textures.
I’m sorry - I don’t understand the 2nd question.
The wood texture is mainly just the bump map from the image texture, yes. Although to get the gaps in the wood deep enough close-up I did actually extrude the geometry down there.
If you click on the image it should pop open a high-res image (1280x860) and you can save it there.
Very creative work. i like the details
Your first answer actually answered the seccondlol but how does one do an AO only render? all the things i see online require UV unwrapping and baking.
Ah, ok - first you need to turn on the AO pass like this:
Then in the compositor you can output just the AO pass instead of the Image:
youre awesome sir thank you very much. every thread and article i found just talked about what AO does for you not how to do a pass. this should really help on a project im doing for the blenderguru contest
Very Creative and imaginative.
Thanks 
If anyone is interested I was honoured to be asked to do a “behind the scenes” article for Blender Nation:
RIP Mr Pratchett