Unfortunately I do not have intermittent steps of the basic model. It started as a simple cube and then lots of extrudes, matrix extrudes were used to make the shape and then the whole thing was placed in hypernurbs
step 2 of 5
The eyes are just spheres on top of the antenna
step 3 of 5
I selected the whole of the base model and then deselected the mouth and top of the antenna and use the "add hair" module. I adjusted the settings with a count of 150k and length of 10m. Made the hair orange and added a kink
step 4 of 5
Add a background and a plane. Put the backdrop material on them both and change the plane projection mode to frontal. Then add a compositing tag to the plane and select compositing background.
Doing this allows the background to be seemless and the object to sit in the scene while the plane accepts and shows the shadows and AO. With this background however I did not need to have strong shadows. Just a little to make the octo sit on the ground.
step 5 of 5
From this top view we can see the 3 lights in a triangle formulation above the object. They were about 2km above the object and the front 2 had soft shadows and the rear nothing. The colour was set at 255:235:215 for a sunlight feel.
Render with AO, GI, AAx4 and enhance sharpness in PS.