Wall of text guaranteed as I expose my rookie 3D experiences about this model. Grab a seat, this gonna be long.
I have had several problems with this one. First, the reference I used as model was kinda tiny: 
Animated sprite:
And I got the colors from this one:
I box modeled it from scratch, with the skills I currently have (it was a challenge set up by a friend of mine on which to practice my modeling skills) and I committed the mistake of applying a subsurf modifier by accident on an early stage and for when I wanted to model further, the polycount was already up to 57280 faces (not very cool for detailing more but fortunately the reference lacks of crazy details).
I totally made up the inner mouth since there is no reference about how the inside of the mouth looks so I grabbed Google again and found some lamprey mouths and modeled it after these (it is a lamprey monster in the end):
I was split in a dilemma, if to use an UV map for the colors and the skin pattern or to apply materials to individual sets of faces. I don’t know if I could add the lights and reflections if I used an UV map instead of applying materials individually so my choice was to apply materials to the faces…
…and for that it needed more subdiv to preserve the curved lines, circular spots and the shape of the underbelly 
I failed miserably at it.
I managed to make the yellow glowing lines of the head somehow decent but the circular spots and the underbelly hadn’t a correct shape. Tried to fix that by manually arranging the vertexes but to no avail (fail more on the underbelly as seen below:
Later on I tried to practice a tutorial from CGCookie (the one about the Tron Glowing balls) but applied only to the fosforescent parts of the monster, so I prepared the materials accordingly (and got a royalty free HDRI light probe pack for my 3D resources). The testing result of that tutorial ended as follows (as for sunday night -rendered at 50% and up to 5 minutes it took to finish): Despite I’m satisfied with that result, I’m not too sure if I will be able to preserve that glow after I try to animate and record a short movie with it.
I spent monday for rigging it, following a tutorial of CGCookie as well (from back August 2010), and learnt the importance of the IK bones, adding constraints and such. The result is as noobie as this:
As you can see, I added the bones by sheer guessing what could be right for his anatomy.
I also added an odd “claw set” for the mouth, as to try to enable it to gap and close his mouth, and 2 bones for the inner teeth to enable it to gnash at whatever it could prey on.
Since it is a very cartoony monster, the claw/fingers despite their looks they can bend slightly to grip things, hence the extra phalanges.
Last but not least, I tried to add the first weight map but… the model loaded badly.
Somehow several copies of the weight map were added on the same place so if I moved a finger for example, it would move that finger but just on the old spot there was another finger (4 copies to be more exact) and my computer lagged and could paint the surface so I needed to delete everything and reload the model without the weight map and guess what was happening there.
Supposedly I was supposed to append all the pieces (fangs, claws, teeth and eyes) to the main model (called “body”) as I made them separately from the main model. But when I did this and then parented the armature to the mesh and then added a weight map, somehow it clonned 4 copies of all the pieces (why? I don’t know - probably I just made wrong steps during the process).
Instead of this, I tried to parent the armature to each piece individually and that seemed to fix that problem… I spend the next hour adding vertex groups for every piece of the model, and part of the body (the fins, the mouth, the eyes, the whip, the teeth…) because like I seen in the tutorial, if I have them arranged like that, I can add or delete parts to each bone, instead of selecting them piece by piece in Edit Mode. That way I can skip to paint everything I don’t want to deform and so on.
And… I need to take a rest from this, but I’m somehow stuck as my questions piles up like “if I do this, can I do this other thing later or will it render it impossible?”
I know the model lacks a low-poly version to ease my computer so I can paint the weight maps and everything else faster but I can’t undo the subsurf mod. at this stage. I don’t even know if I made the bones of the “claw-mouth” structure properly, or if they need an IK to make them to close the mouth, nor even if the inner bones of the gnashing teeth will work at all…
The only thing I know for sure is that it is giving me headaches. I need to paint the weight map to see it moving, but I quite not understand very well how the colors of the weight map works. I know red is a hard non-deforming surface and blue is blubblery but, how I exactly tell a bone to don’t apply a deformation to a nearby surface, for example, how I tell the fingers to don’t deform the body when they are close to it?
So many questions… and I thing this post is already too long. It is screenshot time (I apologize for the size), some closeups and the current “wires” of the model (are they called like that?).
Thanks for reading.
