Articles 465
March 10, 2015 3:00 PM
by Editor in Chief
Remember "Scale" the dragon in Sintel? Guess who sculpted the dragon? The artists is back with more impressive skill set!
How, then, can you qualify for this award? Please remember that this award is reserved for those that are on par with or that excel top notch works published by artists and studios. If such work does not appear during a given week, this award is not being given to anyone. Please submit your latest work to www.blenderartist.org or to the Member's Gallery of this site, or Contact Us to show where your work is available on the internet. It doesn't have to be a Blender render, internal or Cycles. Any other renderer is fine as long as Blender was used as a part of your workflow.
So, it is with great pleasure that www.BlenderNews.org introduces to you the winner of the Render of the Week Award for the week of March 9, 2015: Kevin Hays
Title: "Crystal Turtle"
Genre: Modelling
Renderer: Cycles
Final Image:
Making of: 
Artist's Comments
About Me:
I'm Kevin Hays and I started using Blender back in 2006. I developed a strong interest in sculpting a few years after I started, but more recently I've been interested in texturing and shading. I sculpted the dragons in Sintel and I've done some freelance work over the years, but CG has mostly just been a hobby for me.
About "Crystal Turtle:"
This project started when I saw this image: http://porkpiesamurai.com/ayco/final.jpg
I was just blown away with how cool it looked, and I was inspired to do something similar. I didn't really start off with a well defined goal, I just wanted to make something with crystals that looked cool. I decided to go with a turtle because it has an obvious place to put the crystals (its shell) and also because it'd give me something fun to sculpt. I wanted to really push myself to see what I could do without any kind of time constraint, so I ended up spending WAY too much time on this. I think it was worth it in the end though. The modeling, sculpting, texturing, and rendering was all done in Blender, and the compositing and rendering was done with Photoshop.
Related LInks:
1. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?363015-Crystal-Turtle
2. http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?294277-Jeep-s-sketchbook
3. https://www.youtube.com/user/Jeepster3D