@unknownuser said:

Is there a walk through some place or a video tutorial, I'd really like to learn this and another thing, say I have a shape created in meta modeling and convert it to regular mesh will this process work with it?

A video tut?
Oliver Villar did a tutorial based on this. It explains only the basics though. There is much more potential on this method.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wyzvsmfia0&feature=youtu.be

Simple ideas, working on a grid
Loops, extrudes (insets) and subdivisions.

Alternatively, if these loops can follow a geometrical displacement panel-map, I mean, if the selected face loop can be unwrapped as an aliened quad row on a geometrical pattern…. such a displacement will follow the topology.
This is the basic idea. Too much work? Blender UV editor can do it automatically with 1-2 clicks.

Yeah,
well, the first one is a very low poly box modeling ~10k faces. Any detail comes form normal (tangent space) maps.
The second one is dubdivided a lot and displaced by displ maps. Basically a few cylinders with loops on them
Both normal or displacement maps have been baked- constructed by baking a relief modeling, on a single quad face.
You basically model a relief like panel, you place a second one quad object in front of it, you ask blender to bake displ or nor-maps to "active". (active is the last you select, if interested, I could post a workaround on this)
But in the end, you have this pre baked map, you just use the UV editor to align it to the existed topology.
Here comes the tricky part, the powerful UV editor of blender.
From a certain perspective, this is reverse engineering, the goal is to have a very low poly base with all the maps on it. Easy to export in any renderer. Or another application.
It is a game, a kind of a generator, a conceptual art. Still, it is real geometry. Alternatively, an inspiration for other constructions. It became an obsession LOL, a friend named it "loopinitis" decease.

Recent betas of 3dcoat! The implementation of a new auto-retopology algorithm. Still in beta but looks promising and already useable.
Z remesher is a little better in organic shapes. 3dcoat is more promising on hard surface cases.
Patience though, another auto retopo tool is coming soon. In blender this time. We'll try not to call it lke "b remesher" LOL
Auto retopology is a dream that is coming true.
Still, serious issues there. Auto retopo tools tend to create endless spiral loops around the mesh, in certain cases.
This is rather impossible to manually edit it.
Blender is great on manual retopology. It provides some excellent new tools. It suffers from ugly visualization issues. I got used to it but if you give a try you will understand what i'm talking about.

1. contours tool and 2. grid bridge in blender re topology are wonderful and result to very fast and really clean results.

@Pete
Artisan is a nice tool for those who are afraid to get involved in other apps, especially blender.
Because, artisan is basically a box modeling tool.
Blender is superb on box modeling - subd by any aspect. You don't have to retopo anything as a good topology means loops, auto retopology is basically a box modeling. (from a certain point of view)

@Pilou
thanks,
Gutalin is a great concept artist, an inspiration and a good Z friend.
However "my" approach is reverse engineering somehow. My goal was to easily export all these as low poly objects to any external renderer or a game engine engine.
Gutalin's approach is very difficult to be exported. (without lose of details and quality)
BTW my artwork you posed above is box modeling - subd result and does not use displacements-UV workarounds.
Here an example of how a low poly (<30-40k faces) looks like. Using Tangent normal maps in cycles. Such scenes take less than 30 sec to render. Ideal as background assets.

And, allow me, my favorite recent experiment.

Oh, those scifi looking things?
Well, here is the huge thing LOL
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?273033-Sculpting-with-UVs-and-displacements
How to align UVs on a geometrical texture. This is all about it.

Blender sculpting methods are competitive to zbrush ones.
If this statement sounds like fanboyism you have to check it first.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.66/Dynamic_Topology_Sculpting

Hey guys…
You really need a lot of help.
We could try a meeting
google hangout.
Sharing screens etc
I do it all the time.

for instance, you won't find a good UV tutorial around
neither a good tutorial on cycles.

@unknownuser said:

Another good one is Kent Tramell's human male head modelling series. Nearly 12hrs but mesmerising stuff

Oh my,

You could join the blender sculpting club instead.

TIP OF THE DAY

[0] num pad for camera view.
Select your object or something in the center of the scene
On [N] panel, check LockCameraToView.
Navigate now, zoom etc.
Uncheck LockCamera, zoom so the camera window fill your view port, check LockCamera again, navigate
More friendly to SUpUsers?

OK, joining the club.

There are many reasons to turn a geometry to quads.
SketchUp supports n-gons based geometry.
Blender also supports n-gons.
The way to import the SUp n-gons to blender and continue to be N-gons is the Collada format.
Import in blender as collada then.
Enter edit mode, select all (A), press W menu/[remove doubles], select all again, [ctrl+N], this will turn all normals of faces outwards , in case something messed up in SUp.
Now you are ready to go for a nice UV unwrapping. No need to import textures from SUp (it is possible) because the SUp default unwrapping can be automatically generated in blender. It is the cubic projection.
The blender UV editor is one of the more powerful around and I suggest you to learn it.

Now, you re ready to setup a scene, lighting and go for a Cycles rendering.
And, more additional modeling of course.

C4D!
Great application but also expensive.
Modo became expensive too.
Zbrush - pixologic never asked to pay for upgrades, not yet till 2001,
it is the leader in this 3d sculpting concept. The UI is a nightmare but after learning it you start thinking otherwise.
It is the only UI based on tablets-wacom like. This makes it a bit unique. LOL (OK it isn't a good UI I admit it)

I'm a little confused.
Are we talking about a sculpting painting application?
Or about a sub d modeler?
I'm not talking about rendering capabilities because modo, C4D and blender (cycles) are good on this matter.
All the three of them support external renderers plugins.

@unknownuser said:

Cinema wins hands down! It was faster with my 3 500 000 poly scene, and the new bevel tool is AWSOME! Here is a video showing whats new in R15

Indeed so. 3.5 M poly scene isn't much though, I usually have to handle 10-20 million faces. Blender handles it (on good GPU lot of RAM and VRAM) but C4D wins.

@unknownuser said:

Also Cinema 4D was the best at importing .obj from Rhino - keeping normals intact, where in Blender this is a huge problem - http://www.elysiun.com/forum/showthread … -OBJ-files

Right! We are working on this. And, on many other issues.
As our good friend Pilou use to say, blender is a black hole that eats everything.
BTW blender is a very stable application. In the hands of an experienced user.
It will crash if you ask for something beyond your RAM (sometimes it may not, just hangs there for 15 minutes, you can hear your HD - page file working like hell. You can still save your file though)
Keep in mind, fresh new betas coming every day. Full of new stuff and lot of plugins. Still it is stable. Not easy to find another app that stable.
BTW the recent Zbrush has become a little unstable and unpredictable under certain operations. They're working on this, I guess.

Not many have realized that blender became a competitive sculpting application (blender r2.69)
Competitive to zbrush I mean!
It sounds like fanboyism, but it isn't really.
Entering blender sculpting mode, we enter a different redraw on 3dviewport.
Under multi resolution sculpting, if you have a decent GPU and LOT of ram, you can sculpt smoothly on a 25 million faces, and even on a 100 million faces. It depends on the base mesh topology but this is common to all sculpting apps. I mean on a single object. Zb by example has a limit of 16 millions faces per mesh.
Blender also provides a similar to sculptris (better IMO) dynamically tessellated sculpting mode too. It is called dyn-topo (dynamic topology). The set of the brushes is simpler but IMO more effective than in zbrush.
After all, I'm a bit responsible for the fine tuning of some brushes. LOL (nice to be a close friend to the developer,)

Anyway all these are great applications. A matter of what you are asking for. I. personally use zbrush, 3dcoat, blender workflow. (and sketchup, sometimes), as an assist to blender)
If you're asking for a pro application with great tutorials go for C4D, for modo, or any similar. (I avoid mentioning Max because it is tooo expensive, tons of expensive plugins there)
If you're asking for Democracy, come to blender.

Some years ago, I made the same question Majid.
Blender costs nothing and I started learning it. At the same time, sculpting was really important to me, so I tried zbrush. After 2-3 weeks I decided to buy a license, I became a member of this highly artistic and competitive club.

1. The bad news: both apps have the worst UI ever made. From the greek mythology, between Skylla and Charybdis,
2. The good news: Blender on recent builds became almost competitive to zbrush or other sculpting apps. The development is impressive, more goodies are coming every day. Unfortunately it still lacks of good tutorials. Which reminds me that I have to write one on the excellent blender UV editor. There isn't any good one around.
   ZBrush on the other hand is always the leader in 3d sculpting development, the new auto retopology tool is the best ever made! Pure magic!

@unknownuser said:

Zbrush seems that is focused on organic modeling and there are some questions at mapping ( I guess it is about triangles that may be created while modeling)... also it is capable of car modeling and some architectural.
my main aim is organic modeling and texturing.... so which app is preferred?

Probably blender is what fits in your needs. It is really a car modeler. There is a real and excellent UV editor, a texture painter (zbrush uses vertexpainting and it bakes them on UV maps), it also provides two modes of sculpting. A dynamically tessellated method "dynamic-topology) (like sculptris) and a multi resolution sculpting mode like zbrush. (zbrush also provides dynamesh and multi-res modes)

What else can I say… LOL, I use both apps.
Let's not forget, SketchUp became almost a plugin for blender these days. Tig's excellent obj exporter, And the new collada blender importer made it possible and easy.
Collada is great because it supports the n-gons of SketchUp.
For any modeling other than simple archi structures blender edit-mode is much superior to SUp.

Blender Cycles is a wonderful pure PathTracer and blender is a great platform for the most of the famous Render engines around. All these for free.

The learning curve will be hard though.

1. sculpting, dyntopo, retopology, multires sculpting, UV editor, possibly baking for alternative exports.
2. The edit mode! Modeling
3. The render mode, cycles, excellent node based UI.
   Much more, like animating, particles system (hair, instancing etc )
   And a powerful node based PostPro editor.
   Blender is a vast application.

Mind blowing?
How do you define what "mind blowing" means?
Really mind blowing? Or ... almost mind blowing?
Museums are full of mind blowing artworks.
I don't see how this particular artwork will find its way to a decent art museum.

@unknownuser said:

Registered users is another thing altogether.

Of course they are,
registered users or members.
Compare these numbers too.

I posted many SUp links on the blenderartists forum.
And, the opposite.
Why not?

Many new tools implemented into blender recently, many SUp like tools I mean.
I also posted many small tuts on workflows involving blender and Sup.
How to decently and effectively import from Sup to blender, because the opposite isn't of great use.

BTW the learning curve of blender is a long hard way.
Compare it to Sup, it is a vast application, 20 times larger. What do you expect?
The learning curve of SUp doesn't include tutorials on how to use a sophisticated render engine, right?
Or how to sculpt on a 20 millions faces mesh, how to bake normal maps and displacements on a low poly mesh, how to do retopology, rigging, animating, instances, fluid simulations or cloth simulations.
It also does not include a full operational UV editor (one of the best around)

SUP learning curve includes lot of small tutorials on addons though, some of them not very well done.

Out of topic then. To see ten times more visitors in one of the many blender forums (oh there are too many) should not surprise you.
BTW, I learned a lot more about SUp in the blenderartists forum than here.
I also learned how to use SUp as an assist to blender.
The new collada importer, the support of n-gons, makes it quite easy now.

400 users is a surprise?
Today, a screengrab from blenderartists forum.

Just to remind you the wonderful Douglas Adams "So long and thanks for all the fish" book

"They found a patch of grass which was relatively free of couples actually lying on top of each other and sat and watched the stunning ducks and the low sunlight rippling on the water which ran beneath the stunning ducks.
"A story," said Fenchurch, cuddling his arm to her.
"Which will tell you something of the sort of things that happen to me. It’s absolutely true."
"You know sometimes people tell you stories that are supposed to be something that happened to their wife’s cousin’s best friend, but actually probably got made up somewhere along the line."
"Well, it’s like one of those stories, except that it ac- tually happened, and I know it actually happened, because the person it actually happened to was me."
"Like the raffle ticket."
Arthur laughed. "Yes. I had a train to catch," he went on. "I arrived at the station ..."
"Did I ever tell you," interrupted Fenchurch, "what happened to my parents in a station?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "you did." "Just checking."
Arthur glanced at his watch. "I suppose we could think of getting back," he said.
"Tell me the story," said Fenchurch firmly. "You arrived at the station."
"I was about twenty minutes early. I’d got the time of the train wrong. I suppose it is at least equally possible," he added after a moment’s reflection, "that British Rail had got the time of the train wrong. Hadn’t occurred to me before."
"Get on with it." Fenchurch laughed.
"So I bought a newspaper, to do the crossword, and went to the buffet to get a cup of coffee."
"You do the crossword?"
"Yes."
"Which one?"
"The Guardian usually."
"I think it tries to be too cute. I prefer the Times. Did you solve it?"
"What?"
"The crossword in the Guardian."
"I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet," said Arthur, "I’m still trying to buy the coffee."
"All right then. Buy the coffee."
"I’m buying it. I am also," said Arthur, "buying some biscuits."
"What sort?" "Rich Tea." "Good choice."
"I like them. Laden with all these new possessions, I go and sit at a table. And don’t ask me what the table was like because this was some time ago and I can’t remember. It was probably round."
"All right."
"So let me give you the layout. Me sitting at the table. On my left, the newspaper. On my right, the cup of coffee. In the middle of the table, the packet of biscuits."
"I see it perfectly."
"What you don’t see," said Arthur, "because I haven’t mentioned him yet, is the guy sitting at the table already. He is sitting there opposite me."
"What’s he like?"
"Perfectly ordinary. Briefcase. Business suit. He didn’t look," said Arthur, "as if he was about to do anything weird."
"Ah. I know the type. What did he do?"
"He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and ..."
"What?"
"Ate it."
"What?"
"He ate it."
Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment. "What on Earth did you do?"
"Well, in the circumstances I did what any red- blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it."
"What? Why?"
"Well, it’s not the sort of thing you’re trained for is it? I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits."
"Well, you could ..." Fenchurch thought about it. "I must say I’m not sure what I would have done either. So what happened?"
"I stared furiously at the crossword," said Arthur. "Couldn’t do a single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so there was nothing for it. I braced myself. I took a biscuit, trying very hard not to notice," he added, "that the packet was already mysteriously open ..."
"But you’re fighting back, taking a tough line."
"After my fashion, yes. I ate the biscuit. I ate it very deliberately and visibly, so that he would have no doubt as to what it was I was doing. When I eat a biscuit," Arthur said, "it stays eaten."
"So what did he do?"
"Took another one. Honestly," insisted Arthur, "this is exactly what happened. He took another biscuit, he ate it. Clear as daylight. Certain as we are sitting on the ground."
Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably.
"And the problem was," said Arthur, "that having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around. What do you say? ’Excuse me ... I couldn’t help noticing, er ...’ Doesn’t work. No, I ignored it with, if anything, even more vigour than previously."
"My man ..."
"Stared at the crossword, again, still couldn’t budge a bit of it, so showing some of the spirit that Henry V did on St Crispin’s Day ..."
"What?"
"I went into the breach again. I took," said Arthur, "another biscuit. And for an instant our eyes met."
"Like this?"
"Yes, well, no, not quite like that. But they met. Just for an instant. And we both looked away. But I am here to tell you," said Arthur, "that there was a little electricity in the air. There was a little tension building up over the table. At about this time."
"I can imagine."
"We went through the whole packet like this. Him, me, him, me ..."
"The whole packet?"
"Well it was only eight biscuits but it seemed like a lifetime of biscuits we were getting through at this point. Gladiators could hardly have had a tougher time."
"Gladiators," said Fenchurch, "would have had to do it in the sun. More physically gruelling."
"There is that. So. When the empty packet was lying dead between us the man at last got up, having done his worst, and left. I heaved a sigh of relief, of course. As it happened, my train was announced a moment
or two later, so I finished my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper ..."
"Yes?"
"Were my biscuits."
"What?" said Fenchurch. "What?"
"True."
"No!" She gasped and tossed herself back on the grass laughing."

eh...

Just reminding you, a new update is available. Supporting symmetry and other tools.
Best performance under chrome.

@unknownuser said:

these extra pixel will be used for digital zooming! This to me is a great idea as it should eliminate the need for add-on lens that you never have to hand when you need them

Do you really thing so?
A >$500 lenses system still won't be enough for such tasks.
And, there're more to learn about the high density sensors... it's not that easy.
There're many sites dedicated on testing very expensive photo cameras and lenses.
Ultra expensive leicas - lenses, Canons, Nikons... etc. 24 Mpix, 36 Mpix etc etc
When you come to compare enlarged details, then you'll see my point.

http://stephaneginier.com/sculptgl/
As a friend from 3dcoat forum posted:

@unknownuser said:

Just to prove that sculpting can be simple, powerful - and not required to enlist a vast number of hardware and software resources to work:

Have fun. Best performance under chrome.
I was able to sculpt at ~ 1 million faces, but this depends on your hardware.
A web GL, like sculptris application. It exports obj (and imports)

Blender architectural?
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?300297-The-Architecture-Academy-Stills-Trailer
and
http://www.thearchitectureacademy.com/sp/21229-buy-now

@michaliszissiou said:

Thank you for the link.
I was always good on this.
BTW, extremely boring.
Ancient greek geometry is here, have a look, but what kind of geometry? One that follows the nature of the marble? A fractal geometry then?
If you measure parthenon you'll find lot of golden section there. OK, lot have been published. But you'll also find another kind of section, a god knows where did it came from (again, lot of literature here)
You may find some more, and more.
In the end you may think that these all are simply nonsenses.
An artist always search for a way to measure his thoughts, his feels, his ideas, his senses...
This is all about art.