I am heavily inspired to create things that relate to the time of year or presence of themes that I may have in my current life. In this piece, I was inspired by the various adverts shown on TV during Christmas and how they gave a sense of festive feeling through what they showed and the story they told. I identified the common elements featured in these adverts, that were used to create a festive feeling and tried to base how I created my models to fit in with that theme. The piece was intended to be a short advert but due to time constraints remains unfinished with the intention to be finished in the future. 

To create the cabin, I first had to start off with a basic shape that most resembled the shape of the concept, this of course was a cube. I resized the cube into the size and shape I wanted which was a cuboid, I then added a point to the top of the shape using the knife tool to give the body of the shape the point which would eventually hold the roof.

I added in a new cube and resized the length, width, and height to get the shape I wanted. Once that was done, I entered edit mode and did a loop cut right around the centre of the shape which created a line around the centre of the shape. With the vertices created, I selected them and moved the centre of the shape up which made the shape resemble a roof. The last thing I did with the roof was bevel the middle point to make it have a curve and make it look more natural.

With the basic shape of the cabin made, I then needed to add detail to the cabin, such as windows and doors. I did this by once again getting the shape that resembled a window or door most closely and then reshaping it to fit. Once the shape was placed where I wanted, I then added the actual details to the window and door to make them look more like windows and doors. To do this I had to enter edit mode and do various loop and knife cuts, follow by extruding them to make the detail look the way I wanted. Once the window had the desired look, I copied and pasted it around the cabin in the locations I wanted, this was to save time from having to model replicas of the window in each location.

Once all the details where modelled and placed, the cabin required materials and textures to give it the finalised look. Like seen, the cabin is made up of a cartoony brown material, this is meant to depict wood in a cartoon style I was going for, just like the windows are shown as a non-transparent light blue material. The windows also have a much lower roughness value then the brown body, this is to allow the windows material shine when I contact with lighting and differentiate between materials.

When I was designing this model, I was intending for it to look like how it does in the image on the left, but I wasn’t satisfied with the final product, I felt it lacked clarity and didn’t have the polished cartoon look I was going for. Due to my interest in cartoons such as The Simpsons it inspired me to adapt the current look to feature black lines that feature around the models like seen in the show. I believe that in doing this it provided more depth to the model and allows for easier visibility between each face. I think it also give it that cartoon look I desired from the beginning.

Throughout the process of creating the snowman and cabin, I knew the design I was going for, below are the concepts I drew based on what I wanted to create. The 3D models follow the sketches’ structure but as you can see the details of the cabin and snowman such as windows, corner supports, stick arms and others were not followed to how it was drawn. Generally, when I draw a concept pieces, it is only a way for me to display roughly what I want to create and is only followed very lightly when making.