Here is the latest render of my Christmas tree. This tree, when I am finished will be used for the next Christmas competition for Blender Guru.

I revised how the lights were added in this render. You can barely see them here with the lighting but I think you can get the idea. I need to make them a little bigger, randomize the quantities of color, with those changes I think this method will work out great.

I am not going to be able to finish this project before the competition ends so I can use the extra time to do some experiments. These two renders are exactly the same when you consider the samples in each render layer. The first render was complete in one hour and 48 minutes, four render layers then composited together. The second render was complete in a total or 24 minutes again using four render layers and composited together. The difference was splitting up the render into two different scenes and rendering each separately. Can you see any difference? I will discuss in greater detail in a future post.

One hour and 48 minutes

24 minutes

I used the dresser from the Unity game I am creating based on this hotel so the modeling was just about complete. After adding it to the scene my graphics card wanted to crap out on the render so I created separate render layers and then composited them into this image.

I have started creating the ornaments for the Christmas tree. It was mentioned in the tutorial about complimentary colors etc for the baubles (as Andrew called them, I’ll just call them ornaments) but those colors don’t seem correct for Christmas. I’ll stick with Red, Green and Silver. This first go does not have all the ornaments situated correctly yet but it is a start and the silver has been left out so far.

I added my Christmas Tree to my blank room model both as an appended file and as a linked file. I did this because yesterday when I linked the files none of the textures or the particle system came over but when I appended the file textures and the particle system rendered just fine. Today I tried an experiment and created files using both techniques, rendered the results and was going to post here showing what was happening but to my surprise everything work in both cases as you can see below. I don’t know what I did wrong before but I will use the append method saving file space for the final blend.

Image using the Append method

Image using the Link method

Here is the new christmas tree, no decorations. That is what you get when you first pick them out. 🙂