An Unexpected Gift

Victoria Plum recieves an unexpected gift from Santa.

Scene Breakdown

This image was created as a gift for my sister, Melanie. I printed the image out and framed it for her Christmas. I chose to create this image in 3d because I wanted to add more work to my folio. I also didn't have a lot of time. This image was created in roughly four days. As Melanie loves fairies and Christmas, I wanted to create a piece along those lines. However, a bog standard image of a female with wings has been done to death in the cg world and for those reasons it's not something I would have felt comfortable adding to my website. I wanted to create something that hadn't really been done before. It was then that I remembered her love for Victoria Plum as a child:

http://www.badgerland.co.uk/pictures/book_covers/childrens/victoria_plum_helps_the_badgers.jpg

The character design is very simple so I knew this would be ideal given that I didn't have much time. I also found an old jigsaw puzzle that my sister had in the spare room of the house. On the box it showed two characters, Victoria Plum and Poppy. In the end I changed the look of the Poppy character besides her hair style. I also gave her a Santa hat to keep with the theme. To save time I built the Victoria character and then duplicated it for Poppy, changing the texture and hair style.

I rendered out each section of the scene in seperate passes and combined them in Photoshop. Below are some of the models from the scene:

Zbrush Sculpts

The roof of the house. Originally I had planned to show the entire house but I couldn't get a good view of the characters. I had to chop the roof out of the final comp. It's a shame because I like the result but in the end the final image is what is important, so this was a necessary move. I used a greyscale image of a real mushroom to bring out the details. Displacement maps and normal maps were applied in XSI to bring out the detail from ZBrush.

Snow that features on the right side of the picture.

I used subsurface Scattering on the mushroom house and the hat to give it a more realistic feel.