Making of Squirrel in Winter by Al-Haitham Jassar, Jordon


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…