Major Project - Lazarus - 003 + 004
003
After another meeting with my lecturer she suggested adding some lead to shot 002 to help better portray the speed of the ships.
I had a new problem now though as there was a giant chunk of my material that isn't showing any of the effects like the roughness or displacement. It is as if the camera is clipping through the mesh but I tried everything with the scenes clipping, the camera clipping. nothing seemed to work so for now I am just going to have to lower the plane as little as possible until that isn't visible by the camera anymore.
I tried for a couple of days to try and diagnose the problem but couldn't find what the problem was, so I had to just lower the plane until it disappeared which I hope I can fix soon as having the jets lower to the ocean floor means they will have a nice reflection on the water and there wont be as much motion blur on the water that's close to the camera.
I also tried messing around with the planet in the background but had trouble getting the planetary phase effect on the sphere, I think how it looks now is fine but I would love to get it looking more realistic.
004
After finishing shot 02 & 03 I started getting shot 01 ready to render. I haven't started the animation yet but there is around 500 frames before the animation will be seen so I am going to get everything ready and render everything ready so all of that is done and I wont have to worry about as much rendering then. I can also do other work whilst that is rendering as well then.
The scene I have already from the test renders I did is already going in the right direction and has a lot of things already set up like the particle cloner, RS environment, lighting etc, this will help speed things up a bit as I'm already so far behind.
Although I already have some lighting, the sea fog and some little particles sorted the scene was looking a bit bland, so I went onto some 3d asset websites to look for some fish assets. I could make some low poly fish pretty easily but I wanted to make some of the fish look a bit alien-ish. The reference I'm using for these fish is the ghost leviathan from subnautica, the translucent skin mixed with the internal bones glowing. So I had to find a fish skeleton and a similar model to the skeleton if there is not kits.
I used these 2 in combination to create the kind of fish I was looking for but also used the model on the right to create schools of fish in the foreground, middle-ground and background.
I created these schools of fish by creating a couple different splines going from one side of the camera to the other and then animating the offset of the cloner to get them to swim through. I also added a random effecter to randomize the fish's position and also animated the noise speed to make it look like they are swimming a bit better.
I did have some trouble with the noise though, making the fish bob up and down which didn't look natural at all. This took me a good day or two to figure out but the problem turned out to be that I needed to change the world space in the shader field from the default to UV which seemed to fix the bobbing issue.
I also think the whale is moving way too fast, I think the speed is okay but if it was to go so fast I would have to manually animate its fins and I think the faster way to go about things would be to just use the inverse kinetics that's already working on the whale so all I have to do is just animate the position and make it linear and I'm done with the whale.
I did also want to try something similar to the skeleton fish, with the whale. Without any skeleton it looked a bit weird. I used the albedo texture as a mask on the emission. I tried making the black of the orca model glow green, I tried making the white of the orca glow but it wasn't really working properly.
I have already finished the final render and I am going back and noting what I've already done, I have just thought of adding an animated noise on the glow which could be a nice touch which I will try and add if I have the chance to come back to it.
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