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.
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