already posted on Yafray forum, but i thought i’d share it with the ibgger wider world of elysiun…
criticisms and comments and hearty backslapping please,
arigato gozaimasu!
later
BEAT
Looks good!!
Nice lighting
did you do tranlucensy on the plastic parts(white stuff)?? 
thanks fizzle,
no tranlucency, just regular materials.
i made it quite soft (hard=5), with no spec or ref value.
the translucency that you are seeing is probably due to the bounce light from the floor combined with the softness of the GI
later
BEAT
BetaBix: Really lovely piece, the lighting you used makes the picture especially good, bring out the soft shadows 
Only if I could be bothered to learn Yafray 
Very cool. I like the lighting and the materials alot. It looks very nice, sort of a rubbery plastic. An arm would be cool.
Goo
thanks guys,
the ultimate goal is to make a complete, bad-ass, masamune shirow inspired spider-mech. however, i decided to declare the claw a finished project and post it in here.
yafray really isn’t that difficult. download it, get the latest CVS binary, get the GUI, and then get Yable (of course, yable needs python, which some people have difficulty with). your first pic could be as simple as creating an object on a plane, and then using a hemilight. after that it’s all just trial and error.
the soft lighting in my pic comes from an area light (a light emmitting quad), and that beautiful bounce effect comes from a diffuse photon light. everything else is just fiddling with the settings. i pushed up all the quality settings to get a clean render, but this pushed the render time up to about 15 mins.
anyway, more to do, must be going,
later
BEAT
Whats the hole-thing in the middle for? Swallowing flys? 
My English is poor so in the Slovak language: Je to naozaj nadherna praca a YafRay je naozaj silny nastroj… Niekedy sa tu pri vas citim ako uplny zaciatocnik 
… (Ved nim aj som )
I feel sorry for using slovak
lightning: i’m still undecided about the hole. my original plan was for it to contain a retractable gun barrel, but i was starting to think, like you, that it could be for collecting samples or something. a battle between my instinct for war and a higher yearning for peace, perhaps.
i.am.nobody: i’m sorry, i have absolutely no knowledge of slovak, so i don’t know what you asked me. try your “poor english” - i’ve had a few international girlfriends, so i’m pretty good at understanding things.
later
BEAT