Christmas Decoration

A surreal image, an unreal object that looks real. Created in 3d Studio Max and then lit and rendered in such a way as to look realistic. I also placed a mirror in the back of the image so as to show the reverse.

I started by creating a sphere in 3d and then dividing and extruding and texturing the sections in different ways. Adding some depth to the shell sections and making it look like plastic sections adds some realism.

I created four lights around the circumference of the object. These are blue, green, red and yellow lights and are set into self illuminating spheres to make the light sources more real.

The reflection is blurred using a depth of field focus. This also allows the light reflections and cast shadows to be more obvious.