Making of Green Frog by Massimo Righi, Italy



Hi, my name is Massimo Righi and I am freelance CG artist form Italy. What I'm going to do, is trying to show you the main steps of how I've made my "Male Green Frog".

I've used Maya 8 for modeling, Mental Ray for rendering and Photoshop for the textures. The goal for me was creating a photorealistic render but also a 3d model for animation purpose, without the using of ZBrush (or similar software) and without adding any kind of post work to the final render.

The first thing I've done is doing some research for good reference having in mind the final result I wanted to achieve. The bad is that I didn't find all the views of the same frog so I did use a sort of "mix" of different frogs for modeling the main shape.



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


After that I've created the legs and I've combined them to the body.


As you can see from the WIP picture I've built only half of the frog so that I had only half of the UV map to deal with.