Happy Holidays!
A Christmas piece i did for personal use. The picture was done using a combination of 3D modelling, stylized painted textures and Photoshop to do small edits in order to create the classical winter night feel of the scene.
Markus Løtveit - markus.000@live.com
Breakdown
First i started out trying to nail the concept i was going for. It was a christmas piece so obviously that i what i wanted to aim for. But what does winter and christmas mean for people like me, the average norwegian? The keywords i ended up with were:
Snow, Cabin, Vaccation, Light, Dark, Night, Snowman, Home, and Warm.
Thus i ended up with the concept of a warm cabin looking vibrant with life contrasted by the cold winter night.
I then started blocking the basic shape of the cabin using simple box modelling.
Snow, Cabin, Vaccation, Light, Dark, Night, Snowman, Home, and Warm.
Thus i ended up with the concept of a warm cabin looking vibrant with life contrasted by the cold winter night.
I then started blocking the basic shape of the cabin using simple box modelling.
I then started doing some texturing to try and catch the feeling and style i wanted to go for. As a fan of the bright colorful graphical style Blizzard Entertainment employs in a lot of their games and taking inspiration from some of the Norwegian Christmas ads often seen on tv or in magazines i ended up doing hand painted colorful textures.
At this point i had the basic textures down, albeit some normal and displacement maps didn't work out as i had really hoped. That aside, the image and scene itself still felt very empty, i needed more detail and content for it to feel whole.
I then added a snowman with so me decorations on it like kids would normally do with their parents. In addition i added the mistletoe feeling to further drive home the christmas/winter holiday spirit. At this point i also considered adding other winter related items such as skis or sleds, but decided against it as i was concerned the amount of content in the image could become overwhelming.
The next step was to add the night atmosphere. I changed the lightning to something darker, more purple and exported a render into Photoshop for further edits. Once in Photoshop i started by darkening the background while adding strong light emitting from the window.
The next step was to add the night atmosphere. I changed the lightning to something darker, more purple and exported a render into Photoshop for further edits. Once in Photoshop i started by darkening the background while adding strong light emitting from the window.
For the mistletoe i decided to create the details post process as creating nice foilage even if simplistic/cartoony would take a lot longer and be a lot harder. Further more i decided to edit the snow making it seem more natural and less flat climbing the walls.
I know i wanted the Merry Christmas somewhere on the render, but frankly i had no idea where or how i wanted to do it at first. After a lot of thinking though i figured, why not have it in the snow? Like creating snow angels just that it is text instead. I then added a new text layer, changed the perspective a little bit and blended it with the original screenshot layer making it look like it belonged in the snow.
Looking back at it adding more details such a couple of skis or some sleds could have created a richer image and the text in the snow could have been edited to look more natural. In spite of this i am rather pleased with the result and like the simple, but warm feeling it gives.