Rendering:

I rendered the scene with Mental Ray in six passes.  I made two different fur passes, a beauty pass, an ambient occlusion pass, a volume light, and finally an alpha pass.  The size of all the passes was 2000x3000 pixels.  Anti-Aliasing samples were min1 and max2.  Multi-Pixel Filtering method was Mitchell with Filter Size 4.0. (Fig.12)

Composing:

I then mixed all passes together with different blend modes in Photoshop.  Finally, I added some retouches and colour adjustments to achieve the desirable mood of the picture. (Fig. 13)

Tip:  Sometimes it’s very helpful to leave the final picture for a while and forget about it.  Then, looking at it after some time, you will notice some mistakes.  So you can then begin to compose the image again and the final picture will differ strongly from the previous one.

I hope you have been interested in the ‘Making Of’ this piece, and that you have found it useful.  I wish you good progress and inspiration in your own creative work!

Thanks for your time and a big thanks to 3DTotal for the Excellence Award!