I was approached by an events company to realise a winter market concept for Parkdean's Warmwell holiday park in Dorset at Christmas. Initially I was asked to create images showing different angles for the concept. I was provided with site plan sketch and site photos to work from.
From the plan I proposed a camera angle and blocked out the model using typical dimensions for similar structures. I provided the client with a draft (but functional) viewpoint rendering.
The concept was advanced to include additional market stalls positioned across more of the resort. I was asked what it would take to produce a flythrough and was supplied with drone footage.
Using Google aerial maps, the site photos and drone footage I blocked out the site to see the intent of the work required.
For the stalls and festive accessories I used Indesign to create a mood board of Christmas market ideas, that were further developed with the client to define the look.
Using the draft site plan I developed camera animations which best showed the market concept. This resulted in 3 cameras with a simple cut between each.
With the camera paths agreed I worked on the site model using refences to model the buildings and stalls.
The trees and plants were stock winter models converted into VrayProxy models. I used Forest pack to scatter them across the site plan based on the site references. The gravel paths and mulch were also generated using Forest. The snow was an an optimised displacement map.
Environment lighting was from a HDRI Sunset from NoEmotion that I rotated to find the warm lighting that I was looking for.
The site lighting was made up of V-Ray sphere lights inside buildings. For the festoon and tree lighting I first researched the best method and found that mesh lights gave the best result over self illuminating materials. So I used a trick were I scattered simple spheres along paths / surfaces using Forest Pack. I then converted those into V-Ray mesh lights. For the multi-coloured icicle lights I used a script to split scattered meshes into 3 different random objects and applied a different light to each. Thankfully this trick is no longer required as lights can now be scattered.
The client asked for the scene to have animated characters. Working to a budget I sourced and animated some of the key characters including, Santa, Elves and Reindeer with motion capture clips. Over 120 in characters in total were added.
To finish I used a simple snow system and exported the model into 3 scenes for upload to the renderfarm. These frames were denoised with V-Ray and imported into After Effects. Festive background music was licensed and after a couple of post adjustment tweaks the final video was finished and delivered to the client.
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