Heya guys!
Busy time of year at work, so haven’t had much time to contribute to the community, but the new Christmas Ornament Design Challenge was a fun one that allowed me to explore some materials and workflows I don’t use very often.
I decided to go with a handmade Chirstmas gnome ornament that was using cotton balls and felt sheets to craft this ornament. I first drafted the overall geometry using Plasticity and was super fast to make using lofts
for the hat and basic geometry sphere shapes.
I then imported the geometry to Blender to clean up the mesh a little and create the lanyard using the Blender add-on Cablerator, which make quick work of the process. I then bridged over the geometry into Keyshot.
The felt material was pretty easy to make, as I used the felt material in the material library as a base and changed the color map in photoshop for the different color material. I used it for the nose and the hat material.
Then I first tried to use the fuzz material to create the head and the ball on top, which worked great for the ball on top of the head, but it wasn’t quite looking right for the main body.
I did a little google research and decided to try using a scattering medium tied with a Cloud VDB inside the spherical shape to create a cloudy cotton ball look. Moved around the density map to make it look right and adjusted the parts a little to mesh well together with the scattering medium.
Created some snowflake designs and added them as a label to the hats and the design stacked on top of a displacement map of the same label but with a 9px blur so it has sharper edges.
Used some stock art for the Christmas living room background and then adjusted the exposure and color temperature to create contrast to the ornaments and threw it into the render cycle.
I brought the base render into photoshop where I rendered out just the alpha. Threw the background back onto the render and flatted the image and brought it into camera raw. Added some vignette, color graded in some warmer colors and created more contrast in the highlights and shadows. Added a little bit of sharpening and texture boosting and adjusted overall exposure/contrast/saturation/vibrancy to finish out the render.
Just wanted to share my workflow for this challenge as I definitely ran into some obstacles along the way. One of them was trying to get the Fuzz material a pure white, which I got pretty close, but I could only achieve the look I was going for by using some photoshop magic and pushing the greys to clip into the highlights in the histogram.
Hope you guys had fun with the Christmas Ornament Challenge as well!