hi guys, this should have been my entru for the last BG competition, but i finished too late…
i tried to cheat less as possible, all the spidermna suite is sculpted and rigged, and sandman is done with 3 particles systems…rendered completely in cycles, 3000 passes for the scene and 700 passes for the sandman’s particles, competd together in PS, ocean simulator for the sea… hope u like it!
full resolution
Great job - Just next time (or if you rerender and post again) try to make the sky and water a bit less glazed over 
Perhaps look up some lighting tutorials, if you google it you will get lots of results even blendercookie has some 
Fire_Head431
in fact i tried to obtain such effect of over-glared background to keep the image quite cartoonish and stylized, for the same reason i didn’t textured the children…thank u for the reply, i will keep in mind!
Ahk well it still does look good - I wasnt aware you were going for that effect but yes, if it were meant to be slightly photo realistic (which i think you could achieve) I’d lower the glare
Keep blending
Fire_Head431
Nice job
Really like this picture. Good job 
The cartoonish look is great and matches the render
Would you mind share the blend file or explain how you set up the particle systems? I tried something like this without sucess. I’m really curious how you made this.
beautiful piece of work here.
the particle systems consist in:
-20.000 particles with 90 children per particle, with no gravity or wind sensitivity, for the sandman body; the emitter mesh has a sand texture and it’s still visible underneath the particles. there is a vertex group, particles are less dense in the head for exemple
-6000 particles with 5 children per particle with a wind force filed for the falling sand, emitted only from the arms and the head of sandman
-1000 particles with 5 children for the particles on the ground
-2000 particles with 5 children for the particles emitted from the castle
all of these systems are rendered as an object wich is just a cube with SS, with no random size
there are two more particle systems, for the hair and the pebbles in the sand
everithing is synchronized to the frame 30, so i adjusted all the emissions to get a suitable result on that frame…
cool sandman’s particles
ah, the water simulation isn’t in real time with the particles, i baked it, applied the sim modifier and reduced the vertex count of the mesh…
