I was assigned to create a scene for a shader programming class. I used Blender to rig and skin the pre-made character, tweak the pose, add/edit UVs, and manage materials.
I textured the character with Substance Painter. In Houdini, I assembled the scene, shaded the character and dunes (which used procedural textures inspired by the CG Cookie tutorial on sand dunes), created the hair, and rendered it in Mantra. For the footprints, I used the geometry from the feet, placed it along a curve, wrapped it to the dune geometry, and did a boolean operation. The compositing of the individual render layers was done in Natron, along with a few final tweaks.
The character mesh and a few of the UVs and base normal maps are from included files in in the book Character Development in Blender 2.5 by Jonathan Williamson.
The smoke is stock footage from ActionVFX.