BTS - Holiday Animation 2022

Hi all, here's a behind-the-scenes of my upcoming mini-animation. I'm going to post some photos and then talk about them a little bit! 

First off, as you can see, the topic image is a cute Elf character. She's delivering presents in Santa's stead. I've never done a Christmas animation before... Anyway, I'm happy with the way she turned out. It was really difficult to get her hair to fit inside the hat. I had to take both the hair and the hat into a modelling software and tinker with their shapes. Sometimes, small things like that can take up hours of work.

This next one, (above), shows the character in her full outfit. I thought that the outfit should be revealing, while also keeping her somewhat warm. This image also shows a common trick used to help light a dark scene, which is to remove the ceiling. In this case, the background would have rendered in black/transparent, so I replaced it with red and green for the sake of this image.

Here we're looking at a render where you can see the character and outfit more clearly. It can be difficult to layer the clothing, but once it's done, it's worth the effort. The character is complete with elf ears and unusually green eyes.

Here you can see the outfit's lower layers and uncovered hair, as well as her toenail color. She won't be barefoot in this animation, but I could see using this  character again... maybe.

Now, skin level. HQ downloads of these are available below, (including an uncensored version of this one, just for fun!)

Now we're on to some unrendered images from the actual animation. As you can see, everything looks flat and lifeless, but it will give you a hint of what's to come.

The rendering process merges these 3d scenes with lighting, shadows, reflections, refraction, transparency, and texture maps (such as normal, bump, and displacement maps) into a single image, which can take minutes or even hours per frame.

I think this one is moving. I hope someone opens it soon. ;)

Alright everyone, that's it for my first real animation BTS. Did you enjoy it? Want more like this? Please leave a "like" and a comment, and don't forget the HQ downloads below if you'd like to see anything in closer detail!