In what has become an annual ritual that began a dozen years ago, I’m putting together my latest Totoro-themed holiday card to send out to friends and family. Over time this tradition has evolved from simple illustrated designs to more complex and technical efforts, as I started incorporating things like intricately cut paper patterns (using my Cricut Maker), pop-up architecture, lights, and music. For a bit more history and context, here’s a post I wrote up about producing last year’s card.

While I’ve become more efficient over the years, I don’t have a real process for putting these things together, since I’m continuously changing up the feature set with each new version. I usually try to figure out the basic design in my head, and then brute force together a functioning physical protoype as a proof of concept before producing the full set (usually somewhere between 50-60 cards in total each year). There’s inevitably some amount trial and error. 

This year I realized I might be able to take some of the guesswork out of the protoyping step by previsualizing the final design in 3D in Blender. So once I finished illustrating all the parts in Figma, I imported them as individual image planes in Blender and laid them out according to my intended design. It was quick and easy to put together, and the animated result you see here was enough to reassure me that the design is fundamentally sound.

Next up is production! I usually start making the actual cards pretty early (like around now!) so I can work on them a bit at a time and not feel rushed. I’ll share another update when the finished cards are done.