A friend of mine used to put together design challenges that we would all participate in. This particular challenge was to design a plant/machine hybrid.

In the not-so-distant future, humans have been wiped out, and plants and machines have found a way to work in synergy, creating a hybrid intelligence. The machine parts provide mobility and protection, and the plants provide the fuel. This hybrid sentience roams the land, cultivating the surrounding landscape and helping plants grow, as well as maintaining its mechanical pieces with whatever scrap parts it can find.

The plant machine itself is all modeled and textured in Lightwave, and rendered out of Lightwave. I originally tried doing the background in 3D as well, but I felt like the result just wasn't good enough, so I ended up making my own background matte in Photoshop. I would have liked to make something larger than 1024, but my machine is so old, and the poly count got so high... I was having a lot of trouble. Even for a 1024 render, I ended up having to do limited region renders on the machine and piece it back together. Ugh.

I had a lot of fun with this, but I'm glad it's done... it really got to the point where it had been dragging on too long. Before I finished this, I ended up having so much fun modeling the engine that it really became a project all it's own which you can see here: http://kdubayoo.cgsociety.org/gallery/671567
So after spending so much time on the engine, and then this... it's about time.