Hello, and thank you for reading this thread.
I am new to the blender community, and it would be my utmost pleasure to receive any sort of feedback.
I am attempting to make an underwater render of a sperm whale.
This is just the modeling and the sculpting.
And this is the attempted render.
Thank you.
This is a really late response, but…
The modeling looks pretty good, but I would try moving the eye down just a little.
As for the materials, it looks like you’re using a single, SUPER large-radius SSS shader. I would look into triple-layer skin techniques, or even use a textured diffuse shader. Right now, it looks like it’s made of either foam or wax, I can’t decide which.
For the surface of the water, that should reflect whatever is going on down at the bottom. (Use the Glass shader w/ ior = 1.33 if you want a simple material.) You get to decide whether you want it to be shallow (a lot of work making a somewhat presentable ocean floor) or deep (and dark…).
Try looking up reference images for both materials, re-render, and post!
Thank you lolwel21 for the reply.
I finally had the chance to work on the project. I looked up “triple-layer skin technique” in GPU Gems 3 (since I had no idea what that was), and tried to implement some of the things I understood from there into the picture. I mixed a glossy shader and two sss shaders with different density scales to represent different layers of the skin.
This is what I got.
Using the glass shader for the surface of the water seems to be working, but the skin just looks like a diffuse shader (or is it just me?)… 
That sounds about right. If you look at some reference photos, you’ll find that real whale skin looks pretty diffuse.
If you want to make it render faster and don’t particularly care about physical accuracy (just how it looks), I’d recommend making the water surface invisible to shadow rays. You can do that either with a Lightpath trick (slower to render, more difficult) or in the object panel (under Cycles settings ==> Ray Visibility).
I’d also recommend making the whale a little darker and with more texture. You can add texture using either painted (better, but more time-consuming) or procedural (very uniform, but relatively quick and versatile) texturing.
