I’m going to call this finished. Thanks Modron and ShnitzelKiller for your input, and Colin Litster for his awesome ocean tutorial http://www.cogfilms.com/tutorials.html.
All work was done in Blender. The render took about a minute and a half.
Hope you like it:
If I saw something like that rise from the water, I’d have to change my pants.
I like the idea of not being able to see the whole monster - it leaves a lot of mystery about how big it really is which adds to the scary aspect of the image. But the lighting doesn’t look natural, with the bright light on the creature’s face and the rest of the scene fairly dark. If the light is there for a reason (spotlight shining from a small boat, perhaps?) then the reason for its existence should be shown or implied by the part of the scene we can see.
Thanks for the feedback. I totally agree about the light thing, but I’ll just leave it for now. Maybe I’ll update it later when I’m less tired of this project.
