Great.
Great concept, great modeling.

@unknownuser said:

Lack of Democracy fuels these protests.The Wall Street crooks get away with stealing billions and our government is doing NOTHING about it, even talking about laxing regulations. The 1% elite keeps us in endless wars, unpayable debt while they are getting richer. The virtual slave labor imports and open borders helped to kill our jobs, our 401 Ks have been robbed (it was all planned) , our crooked and corrupted politicians created financial bubbles that ruined us. It looks that our politicians are not taking the protests seriously enough until there is bloodshed. Then, it may be too late.

Totally agreed Pere.
Totally!!!

OK then. Still remind you the eight digits texname issue.
@Pilou

@liam

Time for learning the basics of blender! Just navigation, select, imports, exports.

Export from blender as 3ds, you still have to split the project into groups as 3ds can transfer ~64K tris max per mesh. You can transfer the whole sceen at once though. It's very very fast and stable. If UV maps exist, pay attention on the texture names (for 3ds, 8 digits max!!!)
I do it all the time and it's stable and fast. Please, forget the obj importer, go for the default 3ds.
Among other uses, blender is my swiss army knife.

BTW, the free obj exporter ruby for SU, works OK. Though still something wrong, all vertices are doubled. Easy to fix in blender (delete double verts / recalculate normals outside)

Having involved on these sculpting apps,
I just want to share this with you, at this friendly forum.
Only sadness these days, personal feelings became almost a luxury. Meanwhile old people have to die as soon as possible, this came out, among others.
I'm thinking on a huge scene, a nice building as background, the "ministry of the best gift".
Sadness and a fast growing anger these days.
A zbrush dynamesh-sketch (~2-3 hours), ~900K quad faces, rendered in internal zb render engine (in secs, a preview).

Thanks Boofredlay
No bravos. LOL. Zbrush costs some money but it's a marvelous app. The leader. By all means. The most close to an artists needs.
Tremendously.
Sculptris is a free, great app. Having great tools (the most important). The best choice for getting involved in 3d sculpting.
Zb is a bit difficult to learn but... oh my, this is a straight forward app. A direct tool.
I'm a bit collector of this kind of apps. Having zb, sculptris, 3dcoat, and blender of course. Add groboto, even the artisan plugin. (BTW this last one is the only way I have to cut edge loops on SU meshes)

@alvis

Thank you
I hate recording me, anyway here a 5 Mb timeLapse.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/24090090/ZBrush%20Movie.MP4

Pay some more attention to this wonderful application.
Among others, the new magical (dynamesh) is capable to remesh any obj coming via free obj SU exporter.
We can melt any 3dWH mesh in one mesh, among other wonderful capabilities. We can still add clay and merge other meshes on this. Resulting to a great tool, giving freedom to any artist and unlimited possibilities. Most of 3dwh meshes are more or less problematic. Wrong nomal directions on faces (blue faces), inner faces producing non manifolds (more than two faces on an edge). Lot of apps can't handle these or you have to do a lot of hard work before handling these. New zbrush "dynamesh" hasn't any difficulties though. It remeshes these in a preferable resolution... what a great base for sculpting !!!

Here a test, lot of fun, it took 15 mins. Rendered in zbrush of course, the almost real time preview.
Used some music instruments and I sculpted a face on them.

Nice!!!

About renders: These are peaceful environments, I could live there. Though rather a chaos in my home LOL, dogs etc. But not really.
You could try some SSS on this plant. And a smaller sun. Too blurred shadow casting from the sun tends to look a bit unnatural in some cases. An emitter could work, but I don't know much about vray. All my knowledge is about Cycles.

On this perfectionistic environment, well it's perfect and peaceful. !
Two notes,

• these are probably your own paintings and they look more interesting to me than any render engine.
• This shadow casting, there's some inconsistency on this, no, some unnatural phenomenon. Too blurred effect indicating that sun is near us. Too close...

@unknownuser said:

Thank you Apple for making me expect that every time I double-tap the space bar on my computer a "." will magically appear. I have to do a lot of back-spacing, thanks a lot.

?

@unknownuser said:

Apple haven't really lost their leader,
they've simply gained and spawned a whole load of further Steves! It will be really exciting to watch all their products develop over the next few decades, as it will the offshoots of all those who have been touched by Steve Jobs' wonderful charisma.

I'm not so optimist...

Indeed CS extended version has some tools but not that good.
ZBrush 4 r2 has great hdri lighting and a lot of other tricky tools for this job. Most of all this realtime preview magic and hi def rendering in seconds.
Cinema4d has another interesting tool.
This approach here looks more interesting though.

Playing with the new zbrush4R2 now... this could be a great help.
Just thinking, great finding, wrong place
In the SU community, users could be interested for the opposite app.
Build the house import photo elements.

Excellent render-modelling peter!!!
Always practical solutions, expected from you. A great lesson.

Clean peaceful and beautiful.
Water is great (though not from clay LOL)

I can't believe this! I didn't know.
http://www.artificialowl.net/2008/08/hashima-island-or-gunkanjima-nagasaki.html

The best renders I've ever seen.

The real rendering engine.
How helpful your renders were sid? I remember that they were impressive renders, very useful for presentations, but I'll ask again. How useful to you? Or even to me, (not an architect) ? To have a clear vision of this wonderful concept? A simple raw SU export could serve well. (with some magic touch - you know how)
Just because we're here, in SU forum. Just saying.

Just beautiful.

Open source or other free apps on the podium! Because these are free and because it happens to be the best apps.
Indeed blender and sculptris are good friends, a powerful friendship. Blender now provides one of the best retopology tools and baking capabilities. Excellent UV editor and lot more cookies. A massive app, rewritten from scratch. A new powerful renderer - cycles. Sculptris provides the best sculpting tools (better than zbrush or really close) and an excellent UI. Sintel may not have the best graphics-renderings but a great direction and a great script as well.
Pilou, I didn't vote for DAZ LOL. I really love to start sculpting from scratch.