And a second one on a similar theme. Used Jimmy Haze’s Pixel mosaic script (in part), which you can find here. Other than that it’s just the node editor and some animated cubes again. Click for YouTube Video.
Just a quick update to the Sea Turtle project for the CGTalk HMC:
wow! looks great man 
did you do the detailing on the fins by hand? looks like you’ve got some nice size and shape variety in there, doesn’t look repeated like a texture sometimes does
good luck with the rest of this project!
Yeah I did all the fin scales by hand. Took a while, but alphas just weren’t cutting it. The neck and other areas where the fins meet the body are a mix of alphas and hand-done stuff.
These are looking amazing!
Was just wondering, have these been rendered using YafaRay or completely in Blender?
@hulahoop47: Those were rendered in blender internal.
These on the other hand were rendered in V-Ray. I’ve been working on the project for some time now but only recently have I bought the full version in order to start on getting some high-res renders out.
those are phenomenal!! I feel that the textures hold them back from complete photorealism ever so slightly, but i think i actually prefer them the way they are. I love the sense of scale and space in the top one. It’s funny, they both make me feel nostalgic and think of someplace i have explored as a little kid, even tho i grew up in a rural area 
Just a bit of sculpting on a pillar to play with the GSoC sculpt build. I wanted to have a go at using the new tools for something inorganic. I baked the normals to a lowpoly mesh and created a realtime (GLSL) version:
Lowpoly:
Sculpt:
And a head sculpt, again using the JWilkins GSoC build. Got a bit carried away with the crease brush. Normal mapped (slightly) low poly viewport render.
Sculpted from this:
Pillar look great. One thing about you head: they shouldn’t be widest in ears area but above like here:
Just try to make them inverted eggs.
Another render of the previous sculpt, and a new one (still WIP I think). The one thing I still dont like doing purely by sculpting is eyes - it just doesnt feel precice enough for the fine details like the eyelids. Just need to practice I suppose.
Ben, having experience with ZBrush, what’s your feeling now of JWilkins GSoC sculpt branch? (Performance wise, tool wise, workflow,…)
The two are actually very comparable with the improvements JWilkins is making (sorry, I’m not sure what the J stands for). The main difference I suppose now is the level of polish and optimisation that zbrush has. In particular the smooth brush and anchored brush strokes are much faster in zbrush. Apart from that it’s the other features such as zspheres and masking, but those arent really within the domain of the GSoC project (at least this one, I believe the multires project will deal with masking).
Ben, thanks for the feedback.
It looks like the GSoC project of Jason (that’s what the J stands for…) will be one of the more succesfull GSoC Blender has seen so far…:D.
no doubt at has already been fast tracked into trunk for the beta release.
Nice work ben it would be nice to see you sculpt something radically different an old lady, an fat or gaunt character. though this head is nice, it feels too close to you pirate captain in a way.
True. Old men are just fun to do, lots of wrinkles and creases to sculpt. I’ll probably try something prettier next.
A bit more work on that last one, and some playing with GLSL shaders to get a nice matcap effect (now that really would be nice, especially the cavity shading thing zbrush has).
This thread is full of inspiration for me, I really want to say thank you for that and good job on everything in this thread 
@NinthJake Thanks! It’s always the best compliment to get have inspired someone else.
Another sculpt, this time going for a more gracefull female character, but still posessing some strong characteristics. Still WIP but I’m pleased with it. Started from the same base as the other recent sculpts, though I retopo-ed it half way through to give me more to work with on the key areas.
Some further sculpting on the head from yesterday. I’m pretty happy with it now:
I also decided I wanted a simple way of generating my own matcap images, so I created a quick matcap generator file in blender that renders out easy to use 512x512 spheres for use as matcap images. You can download it from blendswap here.
Here are some examples, you can download the matcap images used for the heads below from my site.
