Inspiration

This is one of the best Star wars shorts I've seen in terms of quality.  His laser blasts are excellent, (Has a better glow and blast object than the below videos) and the shows what the Unreal Quixel Mega scans can do.  He could've used Iclone7 to make his character, but used a Human Generator which ;also makes shape keys for facial poses. Just fantastic.

Inspiration

First some inspiration:

Here is a nice warp sequence

This page is a list of people making art with Blender.