December in Detail

The winter image is made of many different components to create a photorealistic feel.

Snowmen: The snowmen are made of two spheres which were scaled to create their basic shapes. I used soft selection to add the small dents and imperfections on the surface and MeshSmooth to smooth them. The snowmen are textured with a small "snow" image cropped from a found image. This same image is also used as the bump map to add texture to the surface. Their noses are made of cones with an orange texture. Their eyes were added in Photoshop with a basic brush as I could not get 3D eyes to look "right". I removed the 3D mouth and eyes seen in the first few WIP images as they didn't look good or realistic.

Ground: The ground is a plane with soft selection to add a bumpy look. At first, I used default textures to create snow-covered grass and had pavements on top (again, with default textures) going through the garden. I decided to find a more realistic image for the grass and found the image seen in the final product of grass covered in melting snow. I removed the paths as they did not "agree" with the soft selection when it was added- the pavement disappeared under bumps and protruded out the other side, so I felt the image would look better if they were removed.

Fences and road: The road surface and fences between the gardens did not change between the first and last images- they always seemed to look okay and fit with the rest of the image. The road is a default concrete texture and the fence texture is taken from a found photograph.

Trees: At first, as can be seen in the video, I used default trees so I could see how the image looked with foliage in. When I created my own trees, I drew the basic shape as a spline then used the Lathe tool to make it 3D. I then applied a photograph "tree trunk" texture. The branches at the top of the tree are a plane with a texture of branches applied. I created an opacity map so the spaces in between the branches were transparent.

Background: The houses in the background are a custom texture on a plane created from many images. There is an opacity map on this plane so the gaps inbetween roofs are transparent. The trees in the background are a background image found online and set in 3DS Max.

Lighting: Initially, I went for a dramatic look with long raytraced shadows extending from the snowmen towards the camera. However, this meant I had to add another light which didn't cast shadows behind the snowmen otherwise the rear of the snowmen and the houses would be black. This combination of two light sources looked wrong, as there was now an unexplained light source behind the snowmen. I removed the second light and moved the shadow-casting light to behind the snowmen which illuminated everything and cast realistic shadows.

Potential Improvements: If I was to create this image again, I would create eyes and a mouth for the snowmen in 3D Studio as well as make the house and background trees truly 3D instead of relying on flat planes. However, this would require a lot of time and skill and may not look much better from the selected angle. A scene with all true 3D objects would look a lot better in an animation as using flat planes falls apart if you move the camera.