a christmas bow

I did this for the latest DrawerGeeks. Click on the “more” link below the pic to see a whole buncha making of stuff if’n you like.

Here’s the wire frames for the character models. So wirey, yet, so framey.

And here are the shaded models. No color, no reflections, no nothin but form yet.

I could have made them all out of shiny metal. Everyone likes shiny metal. I sure do. but I decided, eh, I’m not in a shiny metal mood today. No offense to Pat Boone.

I rendered a number of different passes for this, and composited them in Photoshop. Here’s a transparency pass.

Here’s a depth pass. Whuzzat for? Well, with this I can control the depth of field, i.e. the blurriness of things as they go back in space.

and perhaps my favorite pass of all passes. Just cuz it looks nifty. Anyway, this is the ambient occlusion pass. It even sounds way cool. I wish you could order it at restaurant, it’s so cool. (Ambient occlusion is all about the subtle shadows you get when two objects are close to each other.)

For the base lighting in the scene I decided to go out after our latest ice storm and shoot a light probe and use that for some image based lighting. HDRI baby. Yeah.

But to get the snazzy caustics going on in the ice, I had to put in a spotlight to shoot some photons into the scene. Yes, I’ll have some snazzy caustics for dessert please.

I also used a sampler info node driven into a ramp and then into the incandescence of the characters’ materials to get the little bit of rim lighting. You can see it on the green elf’s head and on Rudolph’s back.

And here’s the final again.  I’d love to hear what you think.