3D Model of the Month – Christmas Centerpiece

The holiday season is the perfect time to showcase the magic of 3D. This year, our team has worked on a stunning Christmas model, transforming it from an offline V-Ray masterpiece into an optimized, real-time wonder. Along the way, we blended the precision of manual workflows with the efficiency of automated tools. Here’s how we made it happen, step by step!

Step 1 – Elves’ Efficiency: Automatic Conversion

The journey started with converting a high-quality V-Ray scene into a real-time model. Using our revolutionary DCC Importer, we made this transformation a breeze. By simply uploading the model via the Web UI, the scene was automatically converted into a real-time-ready format in just minutes. Talk about saving time for more holiday cheer!

Step 2 – Fluffing the Pine Needles: Fixing Normals

The original model’s pine needles were beautiful but lacked the soft, fluffy look we wanted. To fix this:

1. We duplicated the faces to avoid issues with renderers recalculating backface normals. 
2. We baked spherical normals onto the pine needles, giving them a natural, fluffy appearance perfect for holiday décor.

Step 3 – Let It Glow: Enhancing Materials

Rendering inside V-Ray relies heavily on great lighting, but for real-time rendering, we had to work some Christmas magic on the materials:

Wax-like candles: To make the candles glow with festive warmth, we baked the light into the emissive channel of their material. The lights were tinted with a red hue, mimicking the behavior of subsurface scattering for a realistic waxy effect.

The result? Candles that feel cozy enough to warm even the Grinch’s heart.

Step 4 – Dancing Flames: Adding Animation

What’s a Christmas candle without flickering flames? We animated the flames using simple skinned animation with linear interpolation, creating a seamless loop. The gentle movement brought the scene to life, adding a touch of festive charm.

Step 5 – Sleigh-Ready: Two-Pass Optimization

For smooth real-time performance, optimization was key. We tackled it in two passes, keeping everything quick and easy with our Blender Plugin, which allows pass-optimizations by simply selecting the targeted meshes:

Pass 01 – Solid Foundations

For this first pass, we targeted only parts without alpha or animation (e.g., pinecones).

In order to optimize these meshes the most, we baked materials into a new UV atlas, flattened nodes to one single final mesh, and reduced high-poly elements with decimation to 20% of faces.

Pass 02 – All-Inclusive Holiday Cheer

For the second pass, we optimized all the scene meshes, including the ones already handled in pass 01. On top, we added a holiday message on the main candle using a plane with a print texture.

This optimization preserved the UVs as they are, so we take advantage of the high-quality UV atlases of the pine needles. To enhance depth, it also baked ambient occlusion into a second atlas. Finally, we also compressed textures using KTX, for every map but the emissive one to avoid artifacts.

Passes – Why two steps?

The combination of these two passes allowed us to do two levels of optimization inside this model:

By merging all nodes and baking all atlases in pass 01, we could perform a more aggressive optimization on the parts of the model that would not experience a quality loss from it. By adding pass 02 on top, we made sure AO is baked all over the model, and can add compression as a last step.

This way, the 2-pass optimization makes the most out of our model.

The Result: A Festive Showcase of Innovation

The final model is a perfect example of blending artistic skill with cutting-edge tools. Automating tedious tasks like conversion and optimization gave us more time to focus on creativity, while our Blender Plugin proved invaluable for fine-tuning.

This project highlights the joy of bringing technology and artistry together—and what better time to do that than during the holidays?

From all of us at DGG, we wish you a merry and creative holiday season!