Making Thanksgiving

A quick look at making the Thanksgiving scene.

The original render took three days across three computers to process 2130 frames at 1080 x 1920. After learning about some render optimizations I was able to re-render the full scene in 4K on one computer in just 36 hours. A huge improvement! The tradeoff seems to be that some of the out-of-focus highlights in the background tend to look a bit more shimmery. Increasing the number of samples may help with that in the future.

I had also hoped to photo scan some real elements to include in the final render, but that ended up being just a bit too ambitious for this first one. I was able to generate a photogrammetry model of a pie after Thanksgiving, and it came out shockingly well.

The real-world pie was made by Chris Kelly.

Added into the original scene it looks like this:

Not bad! The pie plate itself looks a little funky, so maybe that's an element that would need to be modeled on its own. But from a distance it's definitely good enough. I used Polycam for the capture, and you can even download the pie model yourself if you want to check it out.

Overall, I learned a ton putting this thing together, and was just glad to have finally completed a project in Blender.

Technical Details

• Blender 4.3
• 2130 frames
• 24 fps
• 3840 x 2160
• 200 samples