The Mock Up
Because of its nature as an easily scalable project in 3D software, I spent this past week focusing as much as I could on setting the scene to act as the maquette & as the base for my work going forward.
**A friend of mine has pointed out that the fog & rain are moving in opposite directions, this has been fixed.
The Experimentation
I wanted to ensure the volume of water was handling light how I wanted it to before moving on to the set dressing. There was a lot of experimentation with materials & lights, which were areas I felt I had a shaky understanding of.
Some values are still to be edited and I would love feedback on the state of things. I am tossing a few ideas around at the moment to change things. Primarily, I wanted to have a pillar in the middle of the scene to act as the base for everything to move around, but I am not married to that idea and would appreciate additional input. 🙂
I also tried my hand at sculpting and ultimately made the decision that it would be something for another checkpoint instead of the maquette. It’s a bit outside my skill range at the moment.
The Game Plan
The upcoming week will just be focusing on rough models of everything I plan to add to the scene (like pictured above) and at least getting them incorporated in some form before refining them. The biggest time sink will just be experimental rendering, because animation takes a while.
Great work so far, I love the ambience! Frankly, I like the idea of the above and below water difference being a little jarring, but I do feel like something is off? Maybe the under water needs to be a tad bit grayer like the above? But on its own it looks really good, so I am not really sure. I would just recommend playing with the colors a bit if you can, trial and error.
I’m very impressed what you’ve done for a mockup in so little time. You capture the effect of fog and light really well and I actually enjoy the stark transition of entering underwater, it feels like going into a different, calmer universe. I’m sure once you start adding fish this will be even more true.
Wow, that mockup looks so good! I really hope you have fun making your creatures. Try not to forget that your options are limitless and you don’t have to be fully bound by what we know is actually in existence(and so many deep-sea species we don’t even know about anyway!). If you want the pillar, it could be cool to have it slowly taken over more and more by nature (seaweed, coral whatever) as you go down!