So yesterday, I happened to visit BlenderGuru.com, and I noticed that Andrew Price has a Christmas Competition going on.
Yay! I was happy to know this, because he had mentioned on his podcast that he wasn’t sure if he would even do one this year.
Now, I have never entered one of his contests before (or any contest for that matter), and I haven’t done any large projects yet, and the contest deadline is in about 2 weeks. Also, I work 30-40 hours a week. Therefore, I decided to try to do something simple, but try to make it as high quality as possible.
Right now, the plan is to make a simple nativity scene inspired by this image. I haven’t done much character modeling, but I have played around with sculpting, so I think I can manage some simple Precious-Moments-like figures for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, and hopefully a couple animals. This would be framed with Christmas lights, and that would be about it. In the background, out of focus, you might see a fireplace or something like that. Since it is a very simple scene, I want to try to focus mostly on photorealism and materials.
Just to get my feet wet, I decided to make some Christmas lights, since that would be pretty straight-forward. (Also, I haven’t even touched Blender in at least a month…) So this is the result after 1-2 hours of modeling and re-modeling (plus a little love in the Cycles department).
Please note that the brightness of the lights is a bit exaggerated simply because there is no other light source. And yes, I know that there are no wires, just bulbs. They’re, uh, futuristic Christmas lights. :eyebrowlift2: I’m planning on adding the wires tomorrow, although I’m not quite sure how I’ll do that yet. Then I’ll spend some time sketching out the composition, rather than putting that off until later.
That’s all for now, but expect updates soon. Feel free to comment and critique. Thanks!
Edit: Thumbnail updated