Santa Blast

This week’s Drawergeeks was Santa. I figured one of Santa’s reindeer is always lighting the way, so…..    (click on the image for some cool zoomage action)

First I started off with one of my patented Ballinger sketches of ugliness. I actually drew 8 different butt blasting reindeer before I settled on the one that captured “that look”.

Next I started modeling him. Pretty boxy I know. That’ll be smoothed out later.

 

 

I modeled and smooth santa and started dinking around with some options for the smokey emissions.

I really dug the way this cool smoke was looking, but dang, it had so many weird polygons it was slowing the render way down, and since I banged this out the night before it was due, I had to come up with something way more simple. I ended up using a simple particle system with a few disturbance fields.  You can click here to see the smoke animated. You might want to take a deep breath first…

Next came lighting. I went outside behind our house and took some pictures of the moon. I used a really slow exposure to get all the light and it made the moving clouds streak across the moon. Then I used that with some image based lighting as the base lighting for the image.

I dropped a nice little point light into the reindeer’s bungle region, and another bluish light for a rim light on the other side, with some nice area light shadows, and boom, that was it.

Here’s a close in crop on the action.

 

show hide 10 comments

Yancy Street - December 16, 2006 - 1:36 am

LOVE IT! I love it at this size particularly…instead of that dinky size over at dg.
This rocks Bry….and smokes…and stinks.
P.U.
Check out the animation folks…really. You’ll be glad you did.

pascal - December 16, 2006 - 12:58 pm

Bryan, god,..how many times are you going to WOW me on those drawer geeks things?

You’re a PHENOMENAL inspiration to me!
I’d want to do THREE D just to do what you do.
But,i think i’ll leave it up to you, and just admire what you come up with!
Cheers!

P.

bryan - December 16, 2006 - 11:36 pm

Yancy St., Hey, I’ll take rocks, smokes, and stinks any day! Thanks man.

Pascal, your comments mean a lot. I also feel as though we’re kindred spirits, considering both our subject matters for the last DG. :)

June - December 17, 2006 - 6:42 am

Good grief… I can’t help but wonder what Santa feeds his reindeer on!

Rasta - December 17, 2006 - 7:10 pm

Great photograph of the moon :-) I’m beginning to think that IBL is the sweetest thing in the world.

bryan - December 17, 2006 - 7:47 pm

June, Ha! Probably the same thing kids eat right before they get in the car. :)

Yeah, image based lighting is really a lot of fun, I must say. Much more so when you take the photos or create the images yourself.

mike - December 18, 2006 - 4:48 pm

just LOVED this one. LOVED it. so funny, creative, and well rendered. :D

Sarah! - December 19, 2006 - 1:47 am

This made me laugh out loud! I always look forward to seeing what you do for drawergeeks :)

bert - December 19, 2006 - 3:51 pm

Once again, a beautiful piece of funny.

jim bradshaw - December 30, 2006 - 6:03 pm

The animation was literally breathtaking. You warned us. I am awed by your stuff man.

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