This piece was fully modeled and rendered in Cinema 4D. For the textures I used Body Paint and Photoshop.

Modeling - Part 1

I started the modeling with the snail shell. To do this I used a spiral spine and a circular shape inside a sweep NURBS. I activated it and adjusted the spiral parameters to get, both the necessary turns, and the thickness at the beginning and at the end. Once the turns of the spiral were defined, I edited the model and distorted the mouth, or hollow, of the shell to make it bigger. Afterwards, when it was on the modeled body of the snail, I distorted it quite a bit to remove stiffness and adapt it to the shape of the snail. I also did the first texture tests on the shell, especially to check whether the brown lines on the spiral would come out nicely.

Click to enlarge modeling steps

To model to snail body I started with a cube, which I subdivided several times and stretched to make it an elongated rectangle. I then put it into a HyperNURBS where I distorted it slowly with polygon and dot tools to define the basic shape of the body. I then reduced or extended in size some polygons according to how much thickness was needed in the model.To make the model bend I chose to put several polygons at one end of the model, which formed the head, and I turned them and moved them vertically. I continued to distort polygons and dots and I turned them, reduced them, etc, until I got the final shape of the snail. The antennae and horns were created by means of extruding from the inside; several extrusions were made to provide the necessary length and as in each case as well as to get new polygons to modify the model on that particular side. For the mouth, I cut several polygons to which I later applied an extrude inner.

Click to enlarge modeling steps