Using photos and hand painting (I've used a Wacom tablet) I've made the textures in Photoshop each 2048x2048 (enough though).
I've applied the texture to the frog but I've noticed (I was expecting that:P) that some texture "seams" needed to be adjusted.
I've used the built-in maya 3d paint for that, using the clone tool:)
When the color texture was made I've created the specular, bump and diffuse map from that (7,8)
Now was the time to setting up the scene. I've created a simple plane where to place the frog over and I've rotated it about 17 (I've done that for the frog too).
For the plane texture I've used a photo made by me I've cropped it about 1300x900, and I've made also the bump (9,10)
I've created a camera and I've enabled the depth of field on that.
As you can see form the grab I've made a distance tool placing one locator in the point of focus on the model and the other locator in the camera lens. I've than parented that locator to the camera so that when I was moving the camera also the dimension value was changing (11)
Before working on lighting I've made the shader networks, one for the main frog and one for the eyeball.
After some render test I've decided to use for both cases a blinn shader with a Translucence value=1. (12)
Fot lighting setup I've used an HDRI probe and 3 lights: 1 pointlight (raytrace shadow) and 2 spotlights (13,14)
For MentalRay render settings I've used a mitchell filter with sample leve min=1 max=3, Ray tracing and FinalGather (15)
Final Result:
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