These two orthographic projections show the Molefa in its static pose in 90degree rotations and the second displays the key frames for the rolling animation - Static, Speeding up using the mid-legs and tucking the legs under whilst free-rolling.
I tried to represent the landscape described in the book, with a dark smooth surface for the Molefa to roll on and the huge dominating trees that the seed pods drop from. I added a backdrop including a planet to help portray the alien world. I then combined 4 different animation states of the same Molefa together, randomly scaling, rotating and positioning them in a staggered line towards the distance to give a sense of a fast moving heard. Post-processing in Photoshop allowed me to tweak the colours of the overall ambience. I had to use Photoshop to implement the particle effects as for some reason using the Physical renderer setup in Cinema R13, the alpha-particles I'd created to trail the Molefas didn't show up. Here is an example of the 3D particles I had setup prior to rendering :
And finally here are a few iterations of the process I went through to reach the final result for the scene render, I attempted to apply motion blur to the camera but due to the render time it didn't seem it contributed enough to the image to warrant the additional 6 hours of rendering...
