The perfect week to make mistakes, and boy howdy was there a mistake this week. I was making some decisions about what I wanted in the scene and after reading through a magazine about undersea photography and seeing the interesting way that flashlights behave underwater (example below), I did away with the large column and made the buoy a free-floating object so I could change the focal point to some underwater torch or something similar.

Since I was doing away with the giant column, I needed to add some motion to the buoy to make it fit. My first thought was hand-animating it because, in my hubris, I thought “how hard can it be”. Turns out, hand-animating a buoy moving on an unpredictable surface is a complete pain, and I made it about halfway through before getting fed up with it. I luckily found a video explaining a much easier way to ‘fake’ the animation that would take me significantly less time, and sure enough it took me so much less time. This was after almost 4 days of on-and-off animation, so to say I had used up whatever motivation I had going into the week would be an understatement.

I also spent some time experimenting with the lighting underwater and I think I’ve settled on something better. I’m still trying to get it in the right spot so there’s no lighting artifacts (like pictured).

For now, that’s kind of it. An unfortunate amount of time was spent learning to animate and applying that learning simaltaneously, so the goals for next week are to get all the sculpting & modeling done for the miscellaneous sea creatures and model something to put at the sea floor (if I plan to go that far down).

Final-ish draft so far. There’s always a new lighting error once I do a render. :/

The way I’ve constructed this so far is in a pyramid-of-scope way where I am building functional and interesting scenes as I go, so at the moment I have a theoretical (but rather lame) final product that I can add to in small chunks. The plan is obviously to continue to add more, but I’m trying to work incrementally so I will never be in a “oh shit” momernt and need to move heaven and earth to get something that just works.

At the moment, I have a few different avenues I’m exploring. One would be an end-of-scene with an old sunken submarine that has become the home of several bioluminescent coral & algae species, alongside some fish of some variety, the other is a focal point of a underwater flashlight sinking down and illuminating some increasingly odd things before shorting out.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for keeping up with my work so far! 🙂