Hey Pete, sorry to hear you're having issues with UV mapping, I think you should percevere with it though as your beast would look so much better if you pulled it off.

Just as a side note (and i know i'm being really pedantic here) but when is prey not living? :p (sorry)

:beer:

Hah, true. But Living Prey suggests the hunter is not living. :P

I'll have renders up soon.

That looks good so far. But i don't like the teeth. I think smaller and more teeth would look better.

Ahh personal preferance. I liked the saber tooth look ;)

Still a few things to do. He has to be IK'ed but this doesnt get done until i put him in the scene.

Here he is, retextured and posed.

http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/3113/beast24ix.jpg

Looking good Pete, theres something about the body/shoulder area texturing that isn't sitting too well with me. I think the blood and skin procedural (??) might be a little too strong - though that might not be the case once he's in the environment with the proper lighting.
BTW, why are you waiting 'til he's in the scene to IK him?

Well, a few things have been suggested to fix up his body a bit, so I'm going to go over it again. The scene is pretty dark so having a stronger colour character benefits it a bit.

AS for IKing it well, some lighting is already set up for the set, so if I IK'ed the beast within a seperate scene it would be a waste of time, because then I'd have to do it in the scene with the set in it all over again. I don't know anything about importing rigs along with models, so I usually create a template scene, and always work from that.

Makes life alot easier mate, all you need to do is set-up up the character in a scene with all your controls, effects etc and personal lighting rig if required, save it in a sub folder called 'Character Setups' or something like that. Then when you want to bring them into your main scene, all you need to do is go file>load>items from scene and select the setup scene you want. I actually do the same with my environments too and then pull everything into a seperate scene altogether.
Makes life so much easier, especially if you have multiple environments - also makes life easier if you have multiple versions of the same character as you can animate a character and then pull him into a scene multiple times like I did with my tribal dancers. (hoarde of marauding beasts anyone?? ;))
The main advantage though is that from that point on, no matter how much you screw up your scene, you always have a default to return to when it gets too much!
If you want I can show you the kind of thing I'm talking about on Monday.

Yeah that would be great Kris, I kinda get the idea, but best to show me so I dont f' it all up.