Hi, this is how I made my image for the CGArena challenge themed "winter" and won third prize. I participated a bit late so I thought of making an image which was not too complex, not to forget that it was the holidays season which meant I had little free time to work on it. I choose a good and simple idea; a squirrel facing winter!

First things first, I usually draw my concepts ( on paper or with Photoshop ) and use my sketches as guides through out the whole process, that's why my final works always look so similar to the sketches.


Blender was my main software for making this image; it's a very powerful and amazing free/open source 3D application. I started modeling the squirrel first, nothing new or unusual here, I used the poly-by-poly method (not box modeling).


I didn't pay too much attention to details since I wanted to cover the body with hair later on. After finishing the modeling I named my vertex groups to and gave them different materials (this would help me later when I add hair).



Now I modeled the nut, which will be the main focal point in the image (the squirrel's treasure). I used a Bezier Curve for this.


Then I went through the challenge of making good looking hair for the squirrel. It's not that easy to control hair with the current version of Blender, but the ability to cut and style hair will be implemented in the future versions, sweet!

To make hair in Blender I applied a static particle system to the mesh. I separated the tail from the body so I could give it a different particle system (in the next version we will be able to apply more than one PS to a single mesh I believe). Here's a screen shot from inside Blender


Good materials are the secret for achieving realistic hair. I made the map input to "strand", and also gave the hair a low alpha value. A test render…

Once I was satisfied with the hair result, I made falling snow by applying particle systems to a couple of planes (the emitters).

I turned the particles to halos and gave them an appropriate material.


Now, the scene was tricky because it was simple. How can I construct a simple scene and yet make it interesting? I thought of making a far mountain in the background. I used Bryce5 for that, then exported the mesh to blender and finished it.


Time was running out and I needed to finish the scene before the deadline so I started to model the branches quickly (the big branch was modeled before the falling snow), textured them and started to separate them in different layers. Almost every element in the scene was in a separate layer, this allowed me to control them better while I render (fog, blur, lighting…etc). I also modeled some trees for the background. Here's a test render, as you can see, materials and shadows still needed tweaking.

After rendering all the elements I composed all the rendered layers with Photoshop, then desaturate the image (with the exception of the nut) and tweaked the levels and contrast a bit….. Now I can safely call this image done! I hope you've enjoyed this little making of…

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