I’m working in this dragon-shaped battlestation from a japanese cartoon. Although it doesn’t show, it’s almost the size of the Titanic and hopefully it will look enormous when it’s finished.
My goal is to make it look as real as possible.
Any suggestions?
i don’t have much to say about the model because i’ve not seen the cartoon but the second I saw it I thought of the monster from “An American Tale” classic! Looks like you’ve done alot on the modelling - keep it up and apply a few more textures to make it look more realistic and then put it in a scene that expresses it’s size and it should be interesting! good luck! 
I’ve seen pictures but I have not seen the anime yet.
Anyways back to the critique.Your modeling of the battlestation is quite good,so I would suggest try a upshot camera angle to get that bigger than life look and render with AO or Yafray with a HDRI map to get more photorealism.
Keep it up.
Thanks for your comments.
Regretfully I won’t be able to work in a scene because, as it is, this model is eating all my RAM.
The final model will be posted in the finished projects forum.
I’d seen that cartoon show when I was 9 or 10 years old, nice work.
Renders from diferent angles would be nice to fully appreciate the work.
Some of the characters in the foreground looks a lot like Mazinger Z. i.e the lead character look like Koji Kabuto.
Anyway, the model looks nice, but why is it eating up RAM?
It’s because of the textures. I don’t have enough memory (3 GHz Pentium 4 but only 512 MB of RAM in Windows XP). The biggest texture patch is 4096 x 4096 and the smallest is 3072 x 3072. I can work with it in wireframe mode but when it comes to rendering times they are just ridiculous.
As soon as I upgrade my machine I’ll get to work on this again.
:o :o :o :o
Isn’t that overkill? I think not even Bruce from Finding Nemo has that large a texture map. Unless your are planning to zoom for 20 minutes on one of the metalic plates untill the atoms becomes visible or something?
From that distance, you won’t see any difference between a 60 kb 256x256 texture or those insane textures you mentioned.
I think those texture can easy be made with just the procedural textures, and if you want better textures, I recommend Dark Tree. That will knock you right of your sock.
But lets talk about your original goal: to make it as real as possible, and by that I think you mean photorealistic. The first thought that come to mind is use Yafray + HDRI.
But if you stick in Blender, you should do something about your lighting rig. You can place the camera and use good lighting technique to make it look like a toy, or a gian robot. But I need more input from you to get a clear picture of your intentions.
And if this model is still greater than 100kb, then you should revise it. I hope you didn’t apply a 3 Mb texture map for his theet or something. With a 3 Ghz pentium, this model should render under 2 seconds!
%| and… forgive me for being a little sarcastic %|
LOL… I didn’t use those enormous textures just for that render, I used a plotter to make a poster for my room and small textures just didn’t cut it.
And no… the teeth are procedural white 
I’ll follow your advice and reduce the size A LOT for future renderings.
i think that that one is amazing but you might want to add more teeth or maybe smooth the horns