All rights concerning this character belong to Nintendo, can’t give credit to the actual designer though I’m afraid.
I recreated Alph from Pikmin 3 in Blender using Cycles. The textures on the character were drawn by me in Gimp, the textures on the ground and the stones in the background came from cgtextures.
Rendering took about half an hour with 500 samples using only the CPU. (unfortunately my PC is built with AMD CPU and GPU so it’s not really optimized for rendering… can’t use the GPU to render and my Phenom II X4 955 is not exactly the fastest CPU in the world)
After finishing the scene I started working on Alph again to optimize him for 3D printing and ordered a single color print (white strong & flexible) on Shapeways. I hollowed out the character (reducing the cost from ~30€ to ~10€ with the mentioned material) but left the legs solid to lower the center of gravity. I also made sure the soles of his feet were completely level.
Afterwards I used Blender’s rigid body simulation to test, whether the printed character would stay upright in a gravitational field. (still not sure whether that’s really a good way to test if the printed mesh will keep it’s orientation. but it worked out for me in the end)
It just arrived a few hours ago and I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality and resolution. The fingers and ears seem stable and the character stays upright without any support.
I guess I’ll use shapeways a lot more in the future. 
Took a picture of the finished print:
