Christmas Cards - 2018

A little background info: my best friend's family has a collection of small snowmen ornaments with the names of their family members that they hang up every season. I decided last minute (and I mean within 48 hours of our get-together) that the concept would make for a great card.
Modeling the snowman itself was very straightforward...as well as painting the texture in Substance Painter. I reused and updated my christmas lights asset from a previous year. Fun fact: Instead of cheating and lighting them with a more economical approach, each bulb has an actual filament inside casting white light, which is then refracted properly through the colors of every bulb casing. That's about as realistic as it's gonna get.
I made up for that particular rendering bottleneck by creating two hat assets, and a variety of UV patterns (side note: I LOVE Arnold's custom AOV system) that I'd be able to customize and shuffle to my content within Nuke. The text itself was applied in Nuke using an ST map. Using this approach meant I only had to render once out of Maya...providing enough flexibility in Nuke to output multiple varations, which saved a TON of time and allowed me to print, cut, and matte the cards with enough time to spare.