This greeting scene, created with the help of a storyboarder friend of mine, has been done by blending both digital paint and rendering tecniques, obtaining an unreal style and a magical illustration.
Starting from the sketch, I accurately recreated the desired framing and arranged various and simplified objects, setting the scene in its entirety.
The first object I made is the forklift on the left. I searched for some photographic references, which I set as background, and that were modelled with hard-surface tecnique, detailing only a few parts. The materials used for the body, the seat, the dashboard, etc, are Principled BSDF shades.
We then moved on to the sculpting phase, made friendly by several brushes provided by Blender. In order to save time, we first created a base mesh, by retopologizing the sculpt of the character’s head, so that we could reuse it on all the eight characters, rapidly modifying only the expressions with a few sculpting strokes.
Characters were colored directly on 3D, using texture paint mode. This step took a very little time: our challenge was in fact about getting a good artistic result by playing mainly with light.
The scene contains more than 20 light sources, including some basic panels, covered with a colored emitter material, and a game of warm and cold lights, in order to highlight some details.
The rendering was finally completed in post-production by adding a backdrop, some stars, the snow and enforcing the lights. This made it possible to give the scene the magical and artistic power we wanted to.
I warmly thank Marco Francescato, my friend, colleague, source of inspiration, for all the artistic-creative work he provided for the carrying out of this scene.
Another thank you goes to Blender 3D, which allowed us to quickly join our different competences, gained in many years of work, and create this artwork.