About a day's work in 3ds Max and Photoshop. I modeled and rigged one leg and then posed it and took mesh snapshots and arranged them around the body. The hair/fur rendered out much nicer than I hoped for. I rendered it with the mental ray renderer using the fast sub-surface scattering shader and mr primitives for the hair.
I used Photoshop for color adjustment, painting the banding on the legs over the render and some minor touch ups.
