Paolo - The Creepy Pumpkin Final

The render times of my pumpkin sculpts made me give up on animating anything substantial and it made me realize it was the perfect opportunity to leverage the power of the render passes I learned on the Fundamentals of Compositing course.

Since it took roughly 6 hours to render these 5 seconds (it would have been longer with my whole scene with lots of pumpkins), when I decided to animate the flicker of the flames instead of going back into 3D to add a noise modifier to the candle lights, I figured I'd try doing the same exact thing but with an exposure node in compositing instead. Luckily I had all the cryptomattes and passes I needed for it. And it worked!

I also used a mist pass to add fog (otherwise too render expensive), and a Z pass to blur slightly more the the glowing particles in the background.

Last, but not least, I flickered some frames with just the plain AO pass because I can't think of anything creepier than that. 😂

ps. Paolo is one of the characters of my pumpkin carving project. You can learn his backstory by reading Omar's comment on the main project page.