Otter Stamp Update 2

Ok, the otter. Again a lot of time was spent playing with this with the fur, and I just cannot get to grips with it. The below image shows some of the problems I had.


Really it just got too confusing, and in the end I used this image from http://blog.oregonlive.com/travel_impact/2008/08/tr.bear.2.jpg below and brightened it up in photoshop with some colour saturation and colorized it with red and green to make it a brighter brown. I chose this image because the wet fur is quite similar to that of a swimming otter.


Having assigned the material (with much difficulty playing with UVW mapping) I started to play with lighting. Skylight seemed like a good idea at the time, but really didn't allow me to play with shadows at all. The image below was an attempt to give a blue atmosphere of the water, but along with that came a dull overlay. It hides how bad the uvw map turned out, but doesn't look very aestheticlly pleasing.

Nevertheless, after a lot of playing around with lighting, setting up a camera, and a few more tweaks, I have finally decided to stop wasting time trying to perfect it (I'm never happy!) and here is a final render for my otter stamp.

The feeling behind this was meant to be happiness, showing two otters having fun playing, but I think this is quite good for the 'companionship' feel too. Whereas the cat is more a sense of friendship between owner and pet, this could be more of a 'couple'. I have actually made the otter that's underneath smaller (see below for different camera angle) so it fits if the smaller one were to be female!