Hi, my name is Massimo Righi and I am freelance CG artist from Italy.

What I'm going to do, is to try and show you the main steps of how I've made my "Male Green Frog" image. I've used Maya 8 for modelling, MentalRay for rendering and Photoshop for the textures.

The goal for me was to not only create a photo-realistic render, but also a 3d model for animation purposes, without the use of ZBrush (or similar software) and without adding any kind of post-work to the final render.

The first thing was to do some research to find some good references, having in mind the final result I wanted to achieve. I wasn't able to find all the views of the same frog that I wanted, so I mixed a lot of different frogs in order to model the main shape.

I've started building the low-poly frog using a simple polygon plane and I've extruded the edges following the reference pics. I've then modelled the main body leaving holes where the legs are connected.

After that, I created the legs and then joined them to the body.