The Holiday Card 2014 is complete. I hope you enjoy it. I had fun with this one. Especially as I got towards the end and it all started coming together.
There were a couple of areas that required a lot of manual tweaking. They were areas where I couldn’t use large overall changes and I would have to move smaller bits such as edges and vertices one or two at a time to get the look and shape I wanted. I was able to find a shortcut or two that helped with all of that maunal tweaking.
Some of the shortcuts I was able to use that alleviated some of the work were things like creating only 4 palm leaves completely and then copying them and making some adjustments to make them a look a little different which added variety and yet not as much work. I was also able to short cut with the snow. Once I figured out how to do the snow I was then able to make a copy of the first one and then scale it to fit the next area on the tree, rotate it so a different view was facing forward on that level, and then make relatively minor adjustments to the shape.
The cool new thing that I figured out how to do could also be considered a shortcut. When I started to create the Santa’s hat I considered that I would have to do the main part of the hat in two pieces, the hat piece and the trim. I was able to figure out how to use just the one object and apply two materials to it so that I didn’t have to model those pieces individually and try to get them to fit together. That was a huge plus to me. And something
I will be using again.
There are many things I could have continued to add to this scene. The time constraint of wanting to have it ready for Christmas helped me to stay focused on the base theme and limit my additions, especially when I was able to see how much time I was actually getting to spend working on it. Given more time and better focus I might have added a few more things. Then again, there are a lot of parts of this scene that I can see using as a base to add to for another year.
I am really pleased with the way this came out. I was able to achieve the look and feel I envisioned. Cool!
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