At The Pumpkin Ball Final

This is my submission for the Blender Pumpkin Carving Challenge!

I love Halloween art 🎃

I had two goals for this challenge: a lip sync animation and a good-looking scene that wouldn't disappoint Omar (I have a tendency to leave my creations floating in a featureless void).

Wayne Dixon's lip syncing tutorial was invaluable, since this is my first time animating a face. The CORE videos helped me handle the lighting in the new Eevee, as well as the texturing and compositing.

I built the face rig using geo nodes, following Demeter Dzadik's instructions from BCON23, here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqaxd9gMQMU

Once I had a working face, I grabbed a public domain Halloween song from 1913, At the Devil's Ball. To match the song, I decided to go with an old-timey Americana feel similar to Over the Garden Wall. I used Halloween postcards from the 1910s as inspiration.

I modeled all the scene elements (the trees are generated using sapling tree gen add-on, tho) and textured them. The pumpkins are procedurally textured while the house elements use image textures from Polyhaven. The leaves are image textures of real leaves I picked from a tree outside.

I wanted to have some textural realism while keeping an illustrative look, and I think it worked out well. I used Eevee in 4.2 so I could get good lighting and faster render times.

I'm very pleased with the result (although there's like 15 things I'd fix if I had more rendering time) and I'm glad CGCookie is around to teach me how to turn my ideas into tangible art like this!

Happy Halloween! 🎃