Holiday Message VFX Breakdown

The award-winning team at SPLICE® produces an original Holiday e-card every year – even in the middle of a pandemic. 2020’s “card” was a two-minute short that featured a unique twist on Santa’s delivery of Christmas gifts that brought holiday cheer to a crew of three in an intergalactic space station. In order to create the short, Splice relied on CINEMA 4D for visual effects, 3D modeling and advanced rendering to create a holiday short that was truly out of this world.

With a tight schedule and plenty of compositing, tracking and rendering, the team was on full blast to create stars, nebulas, spacecrafts, and all the other exciting Sci-Fi bells and whistles. Working together, the Splice team utilized CINEMA 4D’s built-in advanced rendering engine for all exterior shots using GI, while integrating Vray into the mix for most of his interior renderings. For motion tracking software, we used SynthEyes, which integrated into CINEMA 4D easily. CINEMA 4D’s external compositing was a vital tool for the large amount of data tracking and 3D layers that needed to be extracted from CINEMA 4D in order to composite lighting elements and VFX layers in post-production.

The end product was a huge success and viewed by thousands around the world. Have a look!