I’ve got the Christmas tree with snow, there are ornaments on the palm tree. Now, the cactus. I debated a bit on what to do here, more snow or a Santa’s hat. More snow would have been cute but visually boring, and I was a little over adding snow to this scene so I decided to go with the hat.
To make the Santa’s Hat I started with a cone with plenty of segments and for the height and also at the ends. I scaled it so it would fit just over the top of the cactus. Instead of using the ‘By Polygon’ selection though I chose to extrude using ‘Local Normal’ so that it was like adding thickness to the next to bottom row of polygons and make it look a bit like that fur edge around the hat. Of course when I added the turbosmooth modifier the
distinction was decreased quite a bit so a few edge loops were added to fix that. That way you can tell the hat from the trim.
That was the easy part. Well mostly. The fuzzy ball at the end was probably easier as that really only required proper sizing and location. Which weren’t too bad. Before I could do that though I had to get the hat just right. I knew I wanted the top to flop over and I sort of wanted the rest a bit squished in. However, I also wanted to get the project finished so I opted for minimal tweaking and shaping with the idea I can refine it as part of another project if I want.
I selected the very top end and deselected the extra edges I had lasso’d in and then I used the soft selection tool again so that I could rotate and adjust the hat end so that it looked a bit more relaxed and flopped over. I did some more minor and finer adjusting by decreasing the distance out that the soft selection tool was effective. This worked really well. I also used it to to a bit of squish or sag. Then I deformed the very end a little to look a little more relaxed and pointed. Then I added and moved the fuzzy ball into place.
So far so good, and no pictures yet.
With the hat modeled it was ready for texture. I found a really cool red velvet texture that I thought would work well so I use that and then I used another instance of it and removed the red bitmap from it and applied a white color to get the white trim. I had to adjust the scale of the bitmap so that it didn’t look clumpy. I had to do that for both the red and the white part of the trim. SO I’ve got my materials to apply but when I tried to apply it by polygon it didn’t work.
To get a material applied by polygon to an object required I set up material ID selections. So I selected the one set of polygons and then in the menu under material id’s I used the set id option and set one selection set to id channel 1. Then I selected the other set and set that selection set to chanel 2. Then I went into the material editor and assigned each of the materials to the correct material channel instead of applying them to the selected object and then they all showed up correctly. So while I wasn’t working on this project with the idea of adding to my skill set I still learned something new and very useful. I used the same white velvet material on the fuzzy ball on the hat. Then I grouped it all together so I could move it around as needed.
Looks pretty cool if I do say so.
One last thing before I take it to Photoshop to add my greeting. When I swapped the gold and green ornaments
around, I was asked if I could also maybe raise the ornament that was by the cactus up just a bit. Since there is
a palm leaf there just a little higher that I could hang the ornament off of I went ahead and moved it.
Check back a bit later and I should have the final piece posted with the greeting.