This is a small personal project, with the goal of creating a visual piece (from modeling to final render) within a day, so it could be used for self-promotion through social media. Since it was the day after Halloween I played with the idea of a Jack-o'-Lantern that didn't want its light to go out.
MODELING
For this stage of the project, I used Blender 3D as the main tool. I started by creating one pumpkin that would serve as a base topology for the other ones. After that being made, I could just duplicate and deform the overall shape of each one. The next step was to add or remove geometry to carve the faces, having careful attention to the topology of the one that would be animated. Since Blender has a modifier workflow, I could quickly add thickness and assign basic materials to the geometry avoiding manual work later on.
RIGGING AND ANIMATION
With the assets finished, I exported them to Cinema 4D, and grouped them inside a null or a layer. That way I could quickly isolate a specific object to any given task. The character rig is quite simple, it's mainly composed of pose morphs and a few clusters to change the position of each element, plus squash and stretch on top of everything. The workflow I found most beneficial was to connect each pose morph or animatable attribute, to a custom slider within each spline controller, via Xpresso. The time spent customizing the rig paid off while animating since I didn't need to search the outliner for the property I want to animate.
TEXTURING & SHADING
I started by replacing the imported materials with Redshift ones and created a dome light with an HDRi. Setting up the lights early on helped speeding up the process since I only needed to focus on materials for one setup.
For texturing the static pumpkins I used Triplanar mapping and Viewport color mixing, so I could achieve variation without having to worry about UVs or duplicate materials.
For texturing the static pumpkins I used Triplanar mapping and Viewport color mixing, so I could achieve variation without having to worry about UVs or duplicate materials.
COMPOSITING
With the rendering done, I used After Effects for minor compositing, like adding the flame, some color correction, and lens effects.