Anemone!

[Retinite]

Hi! I've been working on this anemone for a day now in 3d studio max 6. It has 194 'tentaclethingies' and he whole sene is over 500,000 polys, that is not 'that much'... although the render took over 8 hours! (8 hrs, 16 min ) with a 250 ray, 4 bleed, and 2 bounce skylight... and this on a P4 2,7 ghz 512 mb (not that good but it should be enough). I've rendered pics wiht more poly's and better light and it took lesss... ah well, anyway:
I've got a question about material... how can i ceate organic looking material that lets the light trough but is not transparent (like you hold you finger in front of a lamp, you can see the light 'going trough' your fingers).
This pic was done with raytrace fallof maps to simulate the effect, it's nice but not yet perfect...
and dont mind the tentacle that aren't attached to the 'body' didnt see that in max at that time, in the update ill fix it,
oh yeah, all the tentacles are placed by hand, no scatter or whatsoever, they ocnsist out o 40 to 50 different tentacles which provides enough diversity i guess, i still have to create even MORe tentacles...
but my final question is, can u help me with the materials, please!

depth of field effect created in photoshop... ive also got a clean version, cant render an unsmoothed WF, cause i was stupid enough to clone every tentacle with its own mesmooth mod... im not goign to turn that off 194 times rofl

[Retinite]

update

[Phynius Gauge]

It looks like a bunch of giant mutant sperm being cooked in a pot of gumbo . I think you might be looking for a sub surface scattering shader, but I may be wrong, cause I've never used one before. Anyways its an interesting looking model.