I would lie if I said that my first couple of encounters with the skateboard had been a success. I have never used blender before and as the shape of the board was more complicated to the simple design of the snowman I was stuck when it came to the boards basic shape.
*TBC:
There was an issue using a PNG as a backdrop. PNG Background wasn’t set to “scale”, so I had to go back and scale the image for the scene and rendered the image, but it seemingly wasn’t appearing. I found that the images weren’t used as planes and merely references, so when rendered this doesn’t conflict with a rendered project if the reference layer wasn’t hidden. For this purpose I wanted to do the opposite, so I activated the import-export: import images as planes took the necessary steps to re-render my animation. (Also when applying the texture nodes for the snow, lost some buttons!)
This also posed an issue of the plane being too dark. I turned the specular down and added an emission node and linked them. This allowed me to acquire the effect that I wanted.
Another issue with using the image; it wasn’t high resolution, but I adored the look of the northern lights, with my light point set up I wanted to still use the image in some way.
I simply added nodes in succession to create a fuzzy/blurred effect. This worked well and I finalized my snowman animation. I’m happy with the result of the snowman animation, and although there are minor tweaks I would like to make (texturing the arms, better surround background, rounding off edges) I’m glad I got to play around with the light settings to match the environment and formulate a realistic snow texture and I gained better understanding of the animation and modelling tools blender had to offer.