This is the first thing I’ve ever done with blender that looks pretty cool. Rudolph is sick, so Santa must resort to . . . other means.
– steve
Did you use the default settings (beside color) for all of your materials? It all looks like plastic because of the specularity. Especially the snow.
I think the particle trail could use some smoke, and those balls at the end of it look weird imho.
The sled should leave tracks, too.
Santa’s a bit hard to see. Try adding a little bit of ambient occlusion or a Sun lamp with low brightness to be moonlight to fill in the shadows just a bit.
Otherwise good. I like the tree models.
I’m a total newb, so yeah, everything is plastic. How do you change the properties of the materials? I figured out how to change the color, but I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to change to affect the specularity… That’s one of the things I really need to figure out.
This was the first time I played with fireballs, so I didn’t know what I was doing and added them at the last minute. I guess it makes the vertices glow white hot. Couldn’t figure out how to make it taper off nicely, so it’s got those balls at the end.
As for the tree models, easy as pie. I took a cone, extruded the base several times scaling up each time. Then viewed it from the top, and working from the bottom of the tree up, selected every other vertex of each ring and pulled it down and scaled it up, to form sharp, downpointing branches. After doing htat for each ring, did subdivide with fractal randomness, or whatever it’s called a couple times. Then just dup’ed it a couple times to make three.
You really should do a search to find specularity. Learn the power of searching.
Good technique for the trees. I wouldn’t have thought of it.
SteveC,
I like it! I agree that it looks pretty cool! looks just like some sort of toy set.
If you want to learn more about blender, try the Blender Documentation. There really is alot of valuable info there for those of us who are just starting out.
One other thing, if you want to add a little texture to the snow this Materials and textures crash course. You could use the texture for the Ginger Bread Man, use white instead of brown, and it might do something for you. I don’t know if it will work, but it might be worth a shot.
In any casse, the documentation should help you out alot.
Cheers!