Which grass?

I must choose a grass to use... The top one is easier...

Stone Man wip

The third character (and final) character in my thesis animation is the Stone man.
He is a statue brought to life by an ancient curse.

Here is my progress:











I was super happy with how the leaves came out.

I decided to not use an alpha channel for the leaves;instead, I modeled the shape using 24 quads on each leaf.

I used a normal map on the leaves, but I added some funky depth in random places on the map to give the appearance of volume.
The do kind of remind me of banana leaves though :\

Render testing

A render test using an old version of a character from my school thesis project (Ignore the environment)
Rendered using Mental ray with FG+GI

Please view on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRoKmHxTC8E

I'll post some real video/renders of my thesis-in-progress soon.