Australian Starfish

[jameswillmott]

Trying for that muted lighting you get a few metres under water. I think it's fairly close except for the leftmost starfish might be a bit hot for being underwater. Thought I'd post it anyway.

The starfish are surfaced Nodally, a gradient uses Slope to control the width of the bumps on their tops, so there are large bumps on top, shrinking to small bumps on the sides, rather than fading the bump amplitude...

[Karmacop]

That looks great James. The lighting is fine, but I think you need to give the water some volume (fog etc) to make it look as though it's underwater.

[jameswillmott]

It does have a bit of fog already, you think I need more?

[Kuzey]

It doesn't hurt to play around...but I love the colour/feel of it!!

Kuzey

[Exception]

yesh! fogzy more, and... little dangly white specks out of focus in front of the camera, cos sea water is alsways full of those tiny specks of vile filthy creatures smaller than you when you were 2 days conceived.

[Stooch]

have you heard of the fabled brown starfish?

[Karmacop]

It does have a bit of fog already, you think I need more?
I'm not sure. At the moment it has a "graphic design" look which is really nice ... kind of a super real look. I don't know if more fog will bring it back down to looking real, or as Exception has said maybe some specks in the water. But making something look as though it's in water is really hard and the image looks good as is :)

[Earl]

The starfish are surfaced Nodally, a gradient uses Slope to control the width of the bumps on their tops, so there are large bumps on top, shrinking to small bumps on the sides, rather than fading the bump amplitude...
That's very clever. And it looks great! I think I would like to see more work done on the ocean floor. It looks a little bland. I really do love the surfacing on the starfish, though.

[JML]

how about putting some deformation and detailed texture for that ground ?

like for example :
http://www.mayang.com/textures/perl/preview.pl?image=concrete_closeup_5013217.JPG
or something rocky like that..

the texture on the starfish is owesome!
the crabs looks really nice too

[mav3rick]

tip for rocks in sand copy paste nodes from ground surface and mix via gradient with rock y axis

[harlan]

have you heard of the fabled brown starfish?


LOL!!!!!!!!!



hehehehe

[harlan]

Trying for that muted lighting you get a few metres under water.


Looks great james, nicely done!

[Skinner3D]

I definately agree with the others about the fog. To me it looks the part of the beach just below the surf zone at night. That being said I really like the crabs and starfish.:thumbsup:

[bryphi7]

have you heard of the fabled brown starfish?

LOL! I have...

[DonJMyers]

That's a neat looking image that could be above or below water. Technically, though, the large stones would never lie up that high on the sand. they would be half buried.

[Sarford]

I would place your light higher. From the looks of it now it seems your light is beneath the surface.
Also I would give it a touch more 'fog'. I can't remember seeing things even so close so bright of color. You could also try to ust remove some red from the picture in Potoshop.
You also might concider giving it a tiny tiny blur, or a little edge blur. When viewed from your (diving)mask the world isn't spot-on sharp.
Last thing, maybe a bit of cauistics could help. Not as much as in a swimming pool, but you should be seeing some subtile cauistic because judging from the colors, you're in shallow waters.

Comming along nicley I must say. It is quite hard to do underwaterscene's in 3d.

[jameswillmott]

Thanks for the input everyone.

I think just adding caustics added a lot. It was kind of hard to tell it was supposed to be an underwater shot before.

Added some caustics (baked out from another scene using the Baking Camera and fired onto everything with a spotlight ), added some cockle shells and blurred everything slightly, with more blur towards the edges. I added those annoying white floating specks using HV's too.

[Sarford]

Wow man, that has come a long way! Good job!

I would recomend ajusting your sand shader... Looks now like a concrete surface. From this close to the ocean floor you would be able to see the individual grains of sand. You clould try a bump texture but I think that would only work far away. Maybe try something with particles or the new aps shader?

[Dave Jerrard]

Here's a tip for caustics:

Createa black image in your favorite image processing software of choice, say about 1000x1000. This can be a single bitplane image (Photoshop deceptively calls this bitmap), so you can save yourself some drive space this way. Load this into Layout and in the Image Properties Panel, click the Processing tab. Add the Textured Filter plugin and select Underwater. Make this white, give it a texture scale of about 5 meters or so and bump the frequencies up a bit. Finally, turn on Animate Filters so the underwater texture will animate over time.

Now, just use this image as a projected image through a spotlight tor two, and you have pretty nice faked caustics that actually light the scene and respect shadows too. If the pattern looks too pixelated, make the black image larger. I use a 1k image for setup, but I replace it with a 4k image (or higher) for final rendering. The resolution of the image determines the resolution of the texture. A single bit-plane image gets padded to 8 bits internally in Layout, so you still get all the shades of grey.

I did a few underwater tests a few years ago using this technique, in 7.5, which you can see below. Unfortunately, the animated textures in this filter don't get motion blurred. Maybe in 9.1... :)


He Who Finds Some Really Weird Glitches At Times.

[Bliz]

Looking very 'under-watery' James but I think the only two things left are embedding all the objects 'into' the sand and making the sand itself much grittier and not a flat surface.

The starfish themselves look great BTW.

DaveJ - nice caustics tip. Will have to remember that.