Video:

Download here: MrPai_and_Snowman.avi (5.03MB)

Storyboard:

Modeling:

The Snowman is an arrangement of polygon spheres. NURBS were used for its feet (half of a sphere) and mouth (portion of a torus). His nose has been carved out by using a boolean operation (Edit NURBS -> Booleans -> Difference Tool) of head with a small sphere.

The snow surface is a NURBS plane perturbed manually using "Sculpt Geometry Tool" and "Soft Modification Tool".

Street lamp has been imported from the web.

Animation:

Mr. Pai's walking motion was obtained from Motion Capture data. The shivering motion of his arms was a set of simple scripts for each joint - a sinusoidal plus little bit of random noise equation (defined in the animation expression editor). The rest of the animation is done using forward kinematics.

In order to get mocap to work for Mr. Pai, his given skeleton has been replaced by a skeleton provided by the CMU. His geometry has also been modified to fit the skeleton. Instead of Maya's default soft skinning, skinning weights were computed using the code by Ilya Baran and Jovan Popovic.

Rendering:

Blinn and 'Phong E' surface material with high Reflectivity component has mostly been used for objects in the scene. A carrot texture from a file was applied to Blinn surface material and glow was added as a special effect.

The scene has two light sources: a point light (located inside the lamp) and an ambient light.

Mental Ray was used for sky & sun effect:

In main menu, Windows -> Settings/Preferences -> Plugin Manger, "Mayatomr.mll" should be loaded.
To activate it, in Render View choose: Options -> Render using -> mental ray.
In Render View: Options -> Render Settings, go to mental ray tab, Environment -> Physical sun & sky -> Create.
In Hypershade, the Utilities tab now has sky/sun-related objects whose properties can be adjusted for the desired result.