Hello everyone!
I finished today my contribution to the wall calendar of our company (an advertising agency, http://www.seven-1.com). This year’s theme was horoscopes and we tried to bring out the charasteristics of each sign. So here’s the Crab, or “Cancer”.
It’s a composite of a Yafray GI render, a Blender internal SSS-render and a photo background. Color correction and small fixes made in Photoshop.
hey, thats really good. I like the lighting, Overall very good composition.
good one, crab playing a harp, very original.
m.a.
Wow, I really do enjoy this one. The harp isnt quite as good(Id like a bit of dirt or something on it, it looks a bit too clean), but still, a really fantastic image.
5 stars
Quite nice though I’m not sold on the crab texture.
That’s great, really nice lighting and expression on the crab’s ‘face’. The sand is impressive also. Nice subtle DOF, too (I think there’s some, I could be imagining it).
Edit - the harp is really not accurate at all. Search on google images. Still, great render.
Hehe, really great!
very cool! 
4 1/2 stars rounded up.
Nice work! Crabs have 5 pairs of limbs, so yours might be a mite.
Excellent job, 5*s!
I’m a crazy music fan, so this setting plucks my heart strings. Awesome job; good idea!
~~Stu
Nice work, i really like the mood of Your work and the sand looks really convincing.
Crab texture is a bit boring though, the same all over the body.
-Kroni
One star for each pair of limbs, to bad you forgot one.
Really like the sand. Is it just a big displacement map and a smaller one?
Was thinking about this again…
I did a little research (as in 3 seconds), and thought maybe you could texture the crab like this:
Kind of patches of light and dark… you could probably bake what you already have and then just dodge/burn.
I actually rather like the PLainish texture. The bump map looks fantastic.
Sure it aint photorealistic, but I think it does this image good(though the amazing sand does contrast oddly)
Of course, I suppose it all comes down to personal opinions. Generally, I say the dirtier the better, but this just seems to work…
Though of course blenditall, your opinion is totally valid(and nice ref image) 
Very nice image, I like the Crab, and the sand is very well done. However I think that the music pages could be excluded.
Good job :)!
Very Nice and detailed. Cong.
like the sand. there’s too much visible that the crab texture is a procedural noise(with ramps?). So maybe more layers of noise + some vertexcolors could help it, if there wasn’t time for a bitmap texture. But the sand is great.
Thanks for the comments! I agree about the texturing. The main reason for it is that I suck in texture painting. There was also a time limit… Adding some vertex painting is an interesting idea.
I’m not that concerned about the number of legs since it’s not trying to be realistic anyway. I just chose the amount of legs that suited the picture.
I’m glad you like it. I hope I can finish some free time projects too during the winter… I have also one or two commercial projects coming up which I might post. Not all of them are very interesting since they are ment to be more informative. Maps, visualisation of expositions etc.
Personally i like the texture, but what would i know?
I love it. It’s got this surreal, almost unreal beauty to it. Personally, I think the crab texture looks great. So does the shiny harp. The fact that it’s not dirty or faded just adds to the look of the whole scene. But Irony is probably right about the missing pair of limbs.