There’ll be a few of these “Show Your Working” posts going up, as one of the main points from my feedback meeting was that I had to be more explicit about my real-world references, rather than just other CG films that had inspired me.
The mental image I have of the rough endoplasmic reticulum is like that of battered and rough skin. Fortunately, I already have sculpting experience in that area, from creating the whale for Going Live. Therefore I used a lot of my whale images from that to create a scratched texture.
Cell Shading 