In case no one's seen this yet, here's a page I ran across a while back that illustrates how powerful Gradient Meshes can be if one's willing to put the time in. The quality of the work is truely amazing.

http://www.photoshopcn.com/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=150569&fpage=1

Cheers.

Something to note: turning a path into a gradient mesh irreversibly destroys the original path. This drove me absolutely crazy for a couple days, and I lost a pretty cool outline because of it.

If there's one feature I want in the next Illustrator, it is the ability to use the gradient mesh while keeping the original outline intact.

http://www.creativebush.com/gradientmesh/

This is a bit more advanced, similar to the amazing work erik showed. I have done some okay mesh work, but nothing like what these people are cranking out.

That is amazing what can be done in Illustrator.
I don't know if I would have the patience for all that.

I did use a combination of the mesh and gradients on this watch drawing I designed in illustrator.

http://mayhemstudios.com/images/pop_up/images/Ebel_Poster/Ebel_Poster.jpg

That is amazing. I am currently taking classes graphic design and electronic imaging and am definatly going to teach myself how to do that. That is awesome.

when the gradient mesh feature was first introduced it was a big no-no for print; has anyone had any problems (or sucesses) using a gradient mesh in a print project? what were the results and what tweaks or settings did you use to achieve the best print results? Just curious.

i was given a job where i had to convert a 3D raster image to vector, it's known to take a day to convert by a professional it took me three days and that was learning from scratch with help from a few quick internet help searches although putting a gradient on each node was trying... silly me made the file at 150cm in height which slowed down illustrator but to my surprise it reduced brilliantly and printed perfectly on A4. don't know if that helps but if they get printed at human size (which they are intended to do eventually) will let you know.

I find I can do 99% of stuff without the gradient mesh tool if printing is an issue. Have a look at this: http://icandesign.ca/watch1.jpg
Took me between 7 & 9 hours and I only used the gradient mesh on 2 small areas. The rest was done with pen & feathering