Woot. Yeah, what a strange dream she's having! Why is she smiling??

I hope this even qualifies in the contest, since I only used one model (the girl) and then exported to Maya for editing. I really did throw this together at the last few days of the contest, I put it off WAY too long. I wanted the tentacles to be more translucent-like with the new mental ray physical subsurface scattering shader, and have a nice overbright background, but that's my fault for procrastinating! I for once really really wish I had given myself more time. Oh well, for the tiny amount of time I did spend on it it seems to have came out pretty freakin good! Yeehaw!

Arguably my most complicated scene to date. This is a revolution in my skill cause as you can tell, I've never ever done anything like this before, and I'm quite proud of it since it's the first time I've done this type of image. In fact, I would fav this if it weren't mine, hehehe.

Contest Details: I used the Victoria model. I used the default pose then edited it from scratch myself. My name is Erik Anderson, I live in San Diego, California. I am currently only doing random freelance work. I used DAZ|Studio to open and pose the model, then I exported as OBJ, and imported with Maya. Then When the scene was done I used Mental Ray to render it.

Technical Details

I used the new FAST mental ray subsurface shaders on every object in the scene. Used three lights. The monster was done quickly in zbrush in about 3 minutes. Hair done in Maya PaintFX then composited over with photoshop later, since mental ray can't render PaintFX brushes unless they are converted to meshes. The spines were a real pain in the ass, cause I decided it would look too fake to use the same spine model over and over, so instead I decided to duplicate and modify each one as I went to keep them from looking the same, which took a few hours since tehy have to fit and rotate perfectly. So yeah, each spine is individual. Hard to tell at this res, but I'm working on the higher res one now.

Here is various layers I rendered and composited in photoshop: [link] [link] [link]

Here's a few shots from the Maya viewport: [link] [link] [link]

Oh yeah, and theres a PNG version you can get at this [link] if you don't want any compression