First off is this "Weaved Dragon".
Link to 1024x768 render

The Dragon was a physical sculpture that was 3D scanned by XYZ RGB and was made available by the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory. (big thanks to both)

XYZRGB Site
Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory site

You can get the Dragon, along with other hi-res meshes at that site, BUT they are in the .ply format, and need converting. Check for info on how to do that a couple of posts down.

Also, one thing I also did do was to bring the converted Dragon (I always stick to using objs) into ZBrush, where I smoothed the heck out of the mesh. The Dragon is a 3D scan of a statue (made out of wood pulp resin), so it still had a roughness to it, and I knew I was going to be doing some smooth/reflective rendering of it, thus I needed it looking as polished as possible.

The texture used in my render is a 2048 x 2048 image texture created in Photoshop. For lighting in Bryce, I used the "Back Porch" HDRI that is included with B6.1

The original render size is 1600 x 1200, and it used an HDRI Quality of 64, and took 13 hours to render. (With the lowest quality of 16, it takes about 3.5 hours) 

Link to the original 1600 x 1200 render.

Okay, how to convert a .ply to a .obj (in Windows)

Go to;

http://www.cyberware.com/products/software/plyview.html and download "Plyview for Windows"

That will do it for you, its fairly straightforward, in a Windows 95 kind of gui.

If you want to use it just as with a Command Line....

After installation, I went to my "Start>Programs>Accessories>Command Prompt".

At the Command prompt, I typed;
**cd C:Program Filesheadus (then hit Enter)
**
I placed the uncompressed .ply into that directory. (btw, I had unzipped the Dragon from its .gz file with Winrar)

Then, at the Command prompt I typed;
**ply2obj xyzrgb_dragon.ply xyzrgb_dragon.obj (then hit Enter)

**And, it converted the file, placing the obj into the same directory. The conversion will take a couple of minutes.

As you will see, these files are very large. The resulting .obj will be 285Mb!

Here is Cyberware's similar instructions, which will give you all the DOS commands you can also use when converting;
http://www.cyberware.com/products/software/plyview.html

With glass I usually always like going with either a high refraction of 300, or like used here my other favorite value of 72, which can give your object the appearance of looking hollow. This glass also has some darkening stripes that go around it to make it a little more interesting. In the Render options, I also used a TIR of 6.

HDRI used is "Back Porch", with a Quality setting of 16.

The 1600 x 1200 render took only about 6 hours.

Link to 1600 x 1200 version

Used the Back Porch HDRI. Rendered out to size here, about 35 minutes.

This was an old test scene in trying to get textured and/or frosted glass to look right.

I love it, its painfully red, lol.

Link to 1600 x 1200 version

Link to 1600 x 1200 version

Used Paul Debevec's "Kitchen" light probe;
http://www.debevec.org/Probes/

Changed the HDRI's X to 163.0, and the Z to 67.0

Gaaah! Dude, you're killing us!

Still more to come, one in particular that blows that first Dragon away.

pretty sweet renders

Hexoid Mithril Mail doesn't seem to be at that link, AS.

Oops, I should have been more clear, the **"**Hexoid Mithril Mail" is a Bryce mat inside the "Iridescent" mat pack. (the middle download on that page)

Has anyone managed to open the lucy statue from the big ply archive. I'm still sort of hung up on doing a crystal palace interior. She was in the exibition.

My ram shakes in nervous terror at her.

I have 4gb's of ram. Where can i find the model? i'll check if i can import it.