After I figured Nuke out- I went back to tweak my animation and lighting.

I did some more research on lighting and I set my Main light to quadratic decay, used some ray traced shadows, applied some mental ray textures, and also turned on Final gathering, to make my character fit in with the scene better.

I also tweaked the timing of my animation, and made the tail swish smoother. Mostly I wanted to fix the characters reactions, and add a bounce.

Overall I was quite pleased with the results.

Litghting and textures

I haven’t done much lighting before, but I think it looks pretty good. 

I set up three point area lights, with differing colours and intensity’s, trying to match where the light was coming from, and where it would be reflected. 

The strong beam of light coming in through the window, looked nice, but didn’t seem to be the actual source of illumination for the most part. So I placed my main light at the window, but made it much less intense and angled it more towards my character.

The back and side light I placed, mostly trying to get the shadows on the character right, by showing where the light would be reflected from in the room.  

 

I also redesigned the squirrel texture, to make it fit in more with the scene, but still not blend in too much with the wall behind. I also created a simple texture for the Basket. To help it blend in with the colour scheme of the overall scene.