Making Pumpkins

Carved Pumpkins

Updates don't happen often here, work is taking up all my time basically. But I found some inspiration and a drive to make these pumpkins even though Halloween had just passed. But better late than never.

I don't have many in progress picture for this project, as it felt so easy to do and I kind of forgot. I hope my explanations won't be too confusing without the aid of pictures.

The rather messy mesh before smoothing the surface

For the modelling I started out with a normal sphere that I extruded every second panel to get the shape of a basic pumpkins. To further get the shape I used a FFD-modifier.

Once satisfied with the shape I used the cut tool to carve the faces, also using I reference picture and working in a 2d-view. It was a lot of work cleaning up afterwards and getting a nice topology that wouldn't look weird with smooth on top.

I made the stem the same way as the base shape was made on the pumpkins. Using a cylinder, extruding every second row and using and FFD-modifier to make the shape more uneven.

This was just a very short and easy project, made mostly because it was fun and to update my website with. I do have tons of half finished projects, so it was nice to actually just complete something for once.

  

In postproduction I spent lots of times refining the masks from VRay-Material-ID. I never find them to make perfect masks and should probably do some research out on the Internet to see how to get good masks to work with, since the postproductionen for this picture shouldn't have taken me more than an hour or two. 

Making Something Soft

Stuffed Bambi

On one of those seemingly endless times of scrolling on the Internet I came across this cute picture of a stuffed Bambi and with it I found inspiration. With this work I wanted to focus on creating a fabric-like material. I have always struggled with getting materials to look realistic, so this picture has been a challenge.

Inspiration

Trying to find a pattern for this 3D Bambi wasn't easy, what looked good on a picture didn't look good on the model. But after a lot of samples and experimenting I settled for a darker pattern. This pattern made me think of those thicker fabrics that are often used on armchairs. So that's how my Bambi ended up a lot more different in texture compared to the inspiration picture. For the details I wanted to contrast with a brighter colour, to preventing the cute Bambi getting too dark.

Testing of different patterns

When it comes to rendering passes I tend to always use three, besides the obvious RBG-pass. Alpha, crucial when you want to add a background in post production. VRay ExtraTex with a VRay Dirt map, which gives definition/texture for shadows, difficult to explain but I always use it since it gives more depth to the final picture. MultiMatteElement is the last pass, sometimes multiply depending on how many materials I have. This pass renders your material in solid red, green and blue, which makes it so much easier to select them and do adjustments to just one selection of the pictures. Hope that made sense.

Left: Vray Extra Tex, Right: Multi Matte Element