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Evening Comfort: Moments of Silence

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A cozy Christmas interior rendered in Blender (Cycles). Most elements in the scene were modeled from scratch, including the holiday wreath, garland and decorations on the fireplace, sofa, fireplace itself, rug, festive stockings with gifts. Additional assets were downloaded through BlenderKit to complete the scene.

The character was created in Mixamo Fuse, and I used GIMP and Microsoft Designer for post-processing. This project aims to capture the warmth and festive spirit of a holiday evening at home. Hope you enjoy it!

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Hello! I’d like to share how a poorly defined task can end up taking six evenings.

I decided that from time to time, I could post some videos on YouTube. And as a "true" YouTuber, I chose to start with creating a logo and a short video with it. I didn’t spend much time on the logo idea: since my nickname is "Random Forstart," the logo should reflect randomness and be quick to execute. And since I'm “incredibly creative,” the only thing that comes to mind with randomness is a flipping coin. So, I decided to make a coin with a Roman numeral "I" on the obverse, and on the reverse, I wanted to add a touch of Ukrainian style by placing an ornament in a Hutsul, Bukovinian, or Galician style around the edge, and adding the inscription "Random Forstart" along the edge and rim of the coin.

Decision made! Time to search for references, which, as it turned out, wasn't so quick. The coin in my mind had unusual edges, and such coins are rare—maybe because that edge shape complicates the production process.

Next, I started the blocking. Some elements didn’t look good with standard edges, so I applied subdivision. Then, I created the text: converted it to mesh, extruded it, applied remesh with the appropriate modifier, and added a subdivision surface to smooth things out. At this point, I realized there were too many polygons, and I’d likely need to bake everything onto a low-poly model. Otherwise, even Eevee would take forever to render it on my laptop.

Looking at the obverse, I realized that the Roman numeral "I" wasn’t the best choice, so I added some decor and replaced it with the abbreviation "RFS." It looked better, so I proceeded to combine everything using Boolean. My laptop took a long time merging high-poly elements, and even after that, the shading wasn’t impressive. I passed the mesh through remesh, and ended up with 65 million polygons. Plus, remesh had made the coin look more like a polygonal shape than a circle. I smoothed out some edges with sculpting, deciding to fix the rest on the normal map after baking.

I created a low-poly model with 4000 triangles. That's a lot, but since the model is for animation and not a game, I wanted it to be properly rounded.

During baking, I found that some surfaces were protruding too much, causing artifacts. I decided not to touch the high-poly but to adjust the normal map in GIMP. Overall, it turned out alright.

Then came texturing. At first, I thought I’d just apply textures in Blender, but I didn’t like the result, so I made the texture in Quixel Mixer. It looked great there, but once I imported it into Blender, it somehow changed. I had to adjust it several more times until it looked okay.

Once finished, I moved on to the animation. Initially, I tried using physics simulations and even spent a few hours on it, but it turned out that realistic wasn’t always what I wanted. In the end, I did the animation manually with keyframes. All that was left was to add sound and effects. I tried to do this in Blender, but I didn’t feel like figuring out Blender's video editor, so I did it all in Kdenlive.

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