One of my friends, Elijah, created this artwork called "DIY Space Travel".
I enjoyed the overall design, characters and lighting. I knew I had to try and recreate it in 3D.
This is one of my first large Blender projects in my transition over to Blender from Maya.
It was an ambitious first project since it included a lot of new techniques that I previously never knew how to execute, especially on a new program.

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TLDR: Christmas Lights were a clipping chaos that was eventually resolved by manual tweaks of each light. Fur was a creation and rendering nightmare that was resolved by more obtained knowledge and brute force.

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Most Challenging aspects:

1 - Christmas Lights:
The Christmas lights were a unique pain that I wasn't aware of before starting to add it to the scene. I watched a video on YouTube by Ryan King Art "Customizable Christmas Lights - Geometry Nodes 🎄 (Blender Tutorial)", to gain an understanding of how I can create the Christmas light look. I highly recommend checking out their channel, it is informative and the tutorials are magnificent. If it wasn't for that tutorial, I may have been lost!

However, after adding the geometry node and placing it around the scene I realized the lights were clipping through other objects. So, I tried to fix it with my limited geometry nodes knowledge but I ended up converting the light portion of the lights to a mesh and manually adjusting every light to not clip into another object. So if you were to look at the scene from any angle and at any zoom, you will not see lights clipping at all. Check out the last photo in the post to see the wire chaos!

2 - Fur:
When I realized I needed to render fur I was internally panicking. There are many tutorials on YouTube on fur, I watched most of them and interpreted my new knowledge into the different furs for each character. There were many Blender crashes from adding too many fur particles. I tweaked the furs until no crash occurred. Great! I wanted to render some turntables of the characters to show the furs and textures. HOWEVER, when I decided to render the turntables, I realized fur takes up a lot of render resources = increased render time. It took a few days to render the Yellow character turntable. BUT, the Blue character took around 4-5 days. I've never rendered something that long and intensive before so that was a new treat!

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If you read through all that, thanks for sticking around!
There is so much I could continue to tweak on this project but if I did that, then I wouldn't be able to create more projects.
Live and learn and keep creating!

Check out these links!
www.elijahmazur.com
www.youtube.com/@RyanKingArt/