I started with this
maybe somebody can make a bug or a caterpillar or I don’t know
very nice detail on the leaf and the shell. As always, enjoy your work.
Paradox
Very nice indeed. My only crit is that the dof is a little too much for my tastes, I think it needs to be turned down a little.
In regards to the CGTalk thing, I too, like many others before me, have seen it as one of the goals I’d like to achieve. Many wonderful images are submitted which never make it there however.
Hey I love that leaf!
Would you mind posting the mesh for it and also, what did you use for the texture? Is it an image or did you use procedurals?
I will share all the blend file and textures.
Leaf has color, bump, displacement and specular texture! No procedurals.
This is an AVI with post DoF:
endi.kerekperec.hu/leafy_divx.avi
Looks wonderful! The DoF is shown off better here.
I was just having a play with blender after you mentioned displacement textures (I wasn’t aware blender supported them) and can’t seem to get it to work. I’m using a simple wood texture, and have the variable Disp in the material buttons is turned up to 1, and I activated displacement there too. It shows up in the preview, just doesn’t have any effect when I render, it’s just a flat cube. Is there anything special you have to do to make it use displacement? Thanks.
simply amazing :o
Very good job ! You are on the right way to win a award.
Are the wood table made by displacement mapping too ?
How many faces/verticles you have ?
Witch render you use ? Yafray ? and how long to render ?
Sorry, for my too many answer…
Aquaglow, do you have subdivided your cube ?
You must have many verticles for the displacement mapping work…
Thanks, working perfectly now! I should have realised that… :o
no displace on wood, only color, bump and specular
it is an unoptimised scene, so render time is big, 3 minutes/frame
full anim=10 hours
internal render, post process (DoF) in a composition software (I use alpha channel as Zbuffer, so I can simulate the Zbuffer with mist in Blender)
Thanks endi 
I’m glad to see that you use the blender internal render. Too many people want to use Yafray without using the internal render at the maximum of his possibilities.
Keep up the good work !
@+
EXCELENT…
nothing to tell more !
Slight problem with the DOF… The focus plane in a traditional (e.g. 35mm) camera is parallel to the film plane, but the apparent DOF-plane in this shot is not parallel to the camera. The sharpness of the snail-shell vs. the blur of the leaf and of the table surface does not strike me as what you would actually see in a viewfinder. Quite probably, at the very least not all of the shell would be in sharp focus. The apparent focus on the table-surface would also have to match exactly.
If I were shooting this on film, I think I’d probably try to equalize the focus on both objects by adding more depth of field. I’d use a little DOF for depth, but I wouldn’t want to convey that “the snail-shell is important in my composition but the leaf is not.” I’d also probably use softer, more diffuse lighting (a softbox), and a variety of lighting gels, so that the edges on the shell are a little softer. Again, wanting to more-equalize the viewer’s attention as he scans the image with his eye. The composition itself is very nice for a still-life subject like this.
oh, sundial… this is a test only
I don’t set the camera, only I created a simple movement
a DoF is calculated by DigitalFusion (professional compositing software) from alpha channel (using mist)
That looks really good, when is the due date?