Here is my submission for the GIF(t) Challenge Part 1 (Christmas). It is based off the advent house calendar in my family's favorite Christmas movie, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I took screenshots of all the scenes with the advent house calendar and pulled a few pictures of fan made versions to use as reference art and really tired to model as close to the real thing as I could. I also put a good bit of effort into the texturing. All of the textures on the advent house calendar are made from scratch, besides the art in the windows which were pulled from a public domain picture website. I used procedural textures, dirty vertex colors, and masks I made on Photopea. One thing I wish I would've done differently was to create a shared UV map for the whole advent house calendar to allow for baking to upload the model to Sketchfab. And, then made use of multiple scenes for the text at the end. There were more things I wanted to do, like add snow and ice, and create a more involved environment, but I ran out of time. Cycles X did help a lot on the render times though. Overall I'm really happy with how it turned out!
Amazing idea and very nice execution!