Haunted tree house (final)

Mr Haywood never asked for this. He liked to gamble, yes—in fact, he enjoyed a good game of dice as much as the next guy. Well, maybe a bit more than the next guy, but this was still unfair. When the silly old hag bet her own house, he imagined cosy afternoons spent in front of the fireplace with a good book and a glass of sherry in his hand. No one told him about the spooky business. How was he supposed to know the mansion had placed second in the annual 'Hoo is hoo' competition. That was five years ago, though. Since then, most of the staff has disappeared, until there was only the old bogeyman left, who couldn't scare a mouse in an elephant suit. But where will he find new hands, just five days before Halloween...?

The first thing I added to make the house look more house-like were the windows. I cheated terribly and used those from my Discworld series. I played around with the intensity of emission until I got something that draw the right amount of attention. Then I added the stairs. They are probably the worst stairs in the world but that shouldn't matter too much in a haunted house. There are some who would see it as an advantage, even. The stairs were made through cunning use of modifiers (array and curve, to be exact) but I suspect I would've been better off placing each step individually. Arranging the curve path can be a pain in the bottom.

But since I enjoyed it so much, I applied the same approach when modelling the fence. That one came with the added bonus of displaced ground. Not only did I have to wrestle with the curve, now I also had to do it in rendered mode, to see how it worked with the displacement. Fun.

Creating the ghost was quite straightforward, on the other hand. I just quickly put together a basic human figure, a sheet of silk and let the physical simulation do the rest. A few tweaks here and there and the ghost was born. And I even got to use the figurine as a bare-bone scarecrow.

Then I was quite lost as to what details to add. In the end I decided to go for a few gravestones (you can't really go wrong with those) and a pumpkin patch. Both of them are other examples of me cheating heavily, because they are UV unwrapped only from the front and they use free images I downloaded on Pixabay. The meshes are not just planes (I was afraid it would cast wrong shadows) but I made them as simple as possible. Just like the good old low-poly times...

The signs were created much in the same way, only they are unwrapped properly. I thought I would do the texts in GIMP but doing it in Blender turned out to be much faster (I'm still a complete noob when it comes to GIMP). The trees you see in the background are partly a backdrop and partly duplicates of the central tree, scaled down and covered by merciful darkness.

And then it was a few hours of tinkering with the light and the ground displacement (every change there triggered more changes in everything that was placed on it). I also tried to do some post-processing but none of my (fairly short) list of tricks seem to work in this scene. So I kept the raw render—and submitted it through the CG challenge form. If it makes someone chuckle a bit, I'll consider my scene a success.