Well, this is my latest entry for the contest, it's done from scratch in blender, with no reference photos (hence there might be some proportion mistakes), after I had everything modeled, I did some minor retouching in sculptris of the base mesh, but really minor. I was really pleased at how easy was to do it in blender. I did watch quite some video tutorials thou, mainly about modeling, and even thou they were about blender, they were more about topology and general modeling. This is the first model I've done from scratch with a polygon modeling technique, usually I go the other way, sculptris and then retopo. This was lots of fun. For the wings I modeled a single feather, did 6 copies and made some variations, and then I used hair particles to distribute them according to some anatomycal schemes I found. The fallen god's texture was hand painted in sculptris previous unwrapp in blender. I know I could have used blender's modeling tools, but I rather like more sculptris for those things.
Now I still have to rigg it and add some other thing to create the scene. Really lot's of fun. The level of this competition is going sky high, so what better way to try to keep up than learn something new and have fun along the way? ;P
Hope you like it.
This first tests are rendered in PT, the first one for 14K samples (total overkill, but I just left it cooking overnight) the rest way under 1000samples, for 30 minutes, minor color correction on the tonemapped exr, and logo added, hotpixel was at 1 except in the last one, that was at .25, but that one was cooked for about 5 minutes and little over 200 samples.
I am actually impressed you created this with no references.
