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

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

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

For the main (half) body and the leg, I made 2 cylindrical maps and for the feet I used 2 planar maps: 1 from the top view and one from bottom view. I used a simple checker applied to a lambert shader for checking the overall process while tweaking the UVs.

After that, I duplicated the half and combined everything together, ending up with 1.960 polygons, which is quite good for the low poly model (this then can be used as a cage for the rigging/animation process).

I than duplicated the frog keeping the low model in another layer, and then made the higher poly version (about 30.000 poly) doing a polysmooth. Finally, I added some details using the Maya sculpting tools, trying always to follow the main reference.

Using photos and freehand (I used a Wacom tablet), I made the textures in Photoshop each 2048x2048. Then I applied the texture to the frog, but I did notice (I was expecting that ) that some of the texture seams needed to be adjusted. So I used the built-in Maya 3d paint for that, using the clone tool.

When the color texture was made, I created the specular, bump and diffuse maps from it.

Now was the time for setting up the scene. I created a simple plane where I placed the frog and rotated it about 17° (I've done the same for the frog too). For the plane texture, I used a photo made by me and cropped it to about 1300x900... then I made the bump.

I created a camera and enabled the depth of field on it. As you can see from the grab, I made a distance tool placing one locator in the point of focus on the model and the other locator in the camera lens. I than parented that locator to the camera so that when I was moving the camera, the dimension value was also changing.
 

Before working on lighting, I made the shader networks; one for the main frog and one for the eyeballs. After some render tests, I decided to use a blinn shader with a Translucence value=1 for both.

For the lighting setup, I used an HDRI probe and 3 lights: 1 point-light (raytrace shadow) and 2 spotlights.

For the MentalRay render settings, I used a mitchell filter with a sample level min=1 max=3, Ray tracing and Final-Gather.

Here is the final render of the frog.

I want to thank all of you for reading, and hope that it will be helpful in some way.

 Enjoy!