Photoshop / Fractal Painter
For the body model I used an anatomical study done previously done in Fractal Design Painter as a template. But I felt that the first pass was a bit too "naked" for a corporate presentation. The blue accents above serve to provide some semblance of decency while breaking up the monotony of the continuous brown tones. Because of our current production path I am using planar mapping; one texture is applied to the front and another to the back.
2D anatomical studies created in Fractal Design Painter are mapped onto the 3D spline-based model.
This character has about 7000 polys total - 5200 in the body, 1400 in the Head, and 400 in the mane. It was built basically as a proof of concept, to see if our animation engine could handle a single character this size. Most of our avatars will have 1200 poly bodies for now.