Hi all, some of you may remember this model from a previous post where I was working on learning to animate him. Well, I liked my scale reference quick render so much, that I thought it might be nice as a full size still image render (plus I am fooling around while fighting off a bout of writers block for animating).
hope you like:
edit: Sorry, I realized that I had posted the wrong image, here is the correct one where the leaf is actually deformed 
nice could you give him a metal texture or something instead of plastic? and the leave looks perfectly flat, it should be more curvy, a little subdividing and magnet tool should do the trick 
Thanks, I had originally had the leaf deformed, and for some reason had posted the wrong render 
It’s fixed now with the correct image!
I played with several different materials for it, but I think in the end I will stay with a plastic. Originally it was more of a copper type material, but I had to consider rendertimes for animating, and the slight mirror reflection of the material was going to kill me
Besides, I kind of like the plastic!
I think its nice render, and bout that writers blok thing, maybe u could make an intro, like one of those pixar ones, with the lamp.
thanks Cerebrus. I was thinking about something like a small short intro, but of course in my mind it was alot longer than short
Thanks, maybe i’ll try a couple of simple tests again and see how they come out first. I’ll post them to my WIP page for animation.
You know, I had submitted this to CGTalks finished work board, and they rejected it it’s my first cg image rejection ever! (thats not saying much, i only have like 3 things i have really worked on hard, maybe 4 at best so far). I was a little taken aback, given some of the things I have seen there, I figured that they would at least have put it up. is that normal for cgtalk?
i mean, there is a render of a freakin pda on a poorly textured wood surface… I figured at least mine had some different merit than a plain pda… http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?s=425c74af1a9961869c0f2cfab12adebc&t=260342
ah well, thems the breaks. guess i’ll have to just make a cooler scene and try again!
I must say the leaf is quite striking. How did you do it? Did you use Gabio’s method? Anyways, that is lame about the freekin’ CG deal. Oh well, as you said thems the breaks. The robot is cool, kind of a cute little fella.
So cute I’d buy one. Excellent organic/ergonomic looking robot design. It’s face reminds me of an old comic strip in Mad magazine called Spy vs. Spy. I like the plastic.
Leaf texture is amazing.
Little thing that bugs me is the stem so thick and straight looks like a plastic straw. And wouldn’t a shadow under the leaf make it better?
Thanks for the replies! :)
You know, the leaf was done in about 2 hours to have something to use as a scale reference for my mind, and everyone seems to like it! (The blenderers power flows from the blend apparently! ;))
I found Gabios texture pack here on the forums (a million thanks again Gabio!), and used his maple leaf scan for the col map. I built the nor map from the color map, with a bunch of tweaking to get it how i liked it.
The stem does look straight, but i swear it has some shape! I just cropped it off a bit short in the final composition because it was leaving a ton of dead space on the left side of the final image. It does look a bit strange here, though, being so straight.
I rendered in Yafray with GI only, so that explains the lack of substantial shadows under the leaf. In some later compositions I’ll develop more of an environment for him, and I will try to incorporate the same leaf model. Hopefully it will make the shadows a bit more realistic. For this one I just wanted to focus on the robot and it’s size, so i tried to leave the image uncluttered.
Thanks for the kind words everyone! 
2ner: perhaps I should make the black one also and put him in the scene?