Subsurf and toon shader test, called Nonapus/noctopus since it has 9 tentacles.
Looks cool! I might actually call it a nonapus… You know, it is nonagon, not nongon or noctogon, so why should it be nonpus or noctopus…
Just a thought
Noctapus sounds better I think. I got a basic rigs set up. I used tonn shaders since I didn’t feal like going through the mess of trying to make a realistic material.
noctapus, is eithimologicaly incorrect seeing as “octa/octo” means eight, so if you need a word for nine… you need “nano”. Popsy is right.
Jacco;
Hey Jacco, ‘eithimologicaly’ is etymologically incorrect too. 
I have known it is incorrect since my first post in this thread, I just like the word (well its not really one) better.
Here is a rigged version. Standard armature using vertex groups and mouth is using shape keys.
Does the noise on the sand texture look ok?
It looks very good. Etymologically speaking. 
Nanopussy ?
Older complex lighting setup:
Area lamp only:
New simple lighting setup:
Landscape and noctopus shader updated.
Currently I have set the noctopus to be only lit by the area lamp and not the hemi, which is emiting the texture that makes it look wierd. Scene currently has ~304k poly.
Greatwork!!!i like the one with the blck background and area lamp though…
I love the shadows in that one and have the lighting setups on layers so I can easily switch. It needs some sort of other life in the scene, but I’m not sure what to put.
Dude! that’s about 300K polys too many for what you’ve got in the image. Seriously? What are your render times? Did you rig it just to get the static pose, or are you planning on animating it? If you’re going to animate, you need to take a look at the decimator modifier to get that polycount under control.
The model looks good with the toon shading and complex lighting. You might look into putting a voroni texture on the lighting to make that underwater patchy light effect caused by wavelets on the surface. I think there was a tutorial somewhere about a dolphin that showed how to do that.
The land has the majority of the polys and the render times aren’t that bad. On my 2nd to last render it is using a lamp emiting a texture(clouds I think). Is that tutorial on blendernation? I want to animate it, but I am such a noob at animation it would take forever and it is rigged using very simple shape keys and vertex groups. I found the version with complex lighting to look way too unrealistic with the shadows and how overlit it is.
My adivice would be to reduce polycount. Here is an example of a grid with subsurf lvl 1 on it. Total polycount in this image is 128 tris, (64 quads).
I used two stucci textures, one with a very small noise size and one with big noise size. Then mixed some green colors to mimic your seafloor.
Attachments
Not bad. My land has 57,344 poly without the level 1 subsurf and seperate detail meshes. The noctopus has 36,864 poly with a level 4 subsurf. Here’s a version with the hemilamp emting a voroni texture. The render took 1:03.27 while running firefox.
The noise on the sand is giving me trouble if I try to animate the scene, since it moves with every frame.
Here’s a view of the scene:
A bit of the land polys are not rendered.
I tried using decimator on the land and the scene had ~180k poly and the render time was higher at 1:14.37, but firefox is probably making the times inconsistant.
I may need to add annother area lamp to give it more shadows.