Rigging

To start the rigging I moved into Blender.

I'd like to remark that I used the latest SVN (this means development build) version of Blender, which I believe is similar to Blender 2.46 RC1. This is NOT the current official Blender 2.45, but it has some cool new features that I enjoyed using.
You can get the latest SVN on www.graphicall.org

For posing the snake, I first made a quick retopo so that I didn't have to deal with the large amount of polygons while rigging.
I used the new "bone heat" feature to connect the mesh to the armature. This assigns the vertices to the bones automatically. It's no longer necessary to play around with envelopes or to paint weights, except maybe for some little touchups, so it saves a lot of time. I connected the high poly snake to the low poly snake with a mesh deform modifier.

The rest of the tail was done from two cylinders and instead of bones I used curves here. I also assigned the mouse to an armature. For the tail I used segmented bones, which means that the bone can bend itself. So I didn't need a lot of bones to bend the tail nicely. Click to Enlarge Rigging steps

Hair

For the hair, I used the new hair particle system.

I started by setting some initial values, which you can see outlined in the screenshot. I used a vertex group (= weight painting) to determine the density. Then I went to particle mode to comb, cut and lengthen the hair. I made a subtle irokese hairstyle.
I paid special attention to the hair located on the outline of the model (I had the camera view and pose already set) because in other places it gets a bit lost in the texture anyway.

Here you see my hair shader settings. Again, I outlined the more important things. The settings in the Strands pop-out menu (top left, marked orange) are important, for example the surface diffuse setting causes the fur to inherit lighting from its mesh.
The texture, marked green, has UVs going along the strands and is transparent on one side so that the tips of the hair will be transparent. That makes the hair appear softer. The texture, marked blue, is responsible for the color of the hair: the brighter belly and the reddish irokese.

This picture shows a close-up of the fur texture on a part of the head and the inner side of an ear. I used photographs of different furry animals to create this texture. When using the Blender hair system, it's good to use this kind of texture with dark-bright differences in a small scale. The strands of hair inherit the color of the texture, and this way the hair that is close to each other differs in its brightness making it more visible. If I had used a texture without such structure, for example a single color skin texture, the hair color would be too uniform and the individual strands of hair would not be distinguishable.

Click to Enlarge Hair steps