Glacier Scene

Plan

This is a scene that was not in the pre-vis. There are a series of scenes including this one, there I wanted some environmental shots. So the plan for this one was to have the can float past some glaciers. But I wanted it to transition from day to night as I thought it would be cool to include some northern lights. I had also timed out the music so knew at this point in the project, there was a bit where it sounded really sad, so I wanted it to look like the can was staring up at the sky and “cry”

So first, as per, I gathered a collection of images to get inspiration

Modelling

Day scene

Firstly, I modelled the glaciers by using the landscape addon in Blender. From there I used Proportional Editing and the Lattice tool to make the curve shape in the glacier up in front. I made sheets of ice floating in the water using the landscape addon in Blender again, then squashing them down by scaling them on the z axis to make them flatter. From there I just used a particle system to distribute the bits of ice on the water plan.

The water plane was just a plan with a procedural texture that I made and then a noise texture node, and by animating the W value, this made it look like a moving body of water.

From there I imported the can model into the scene and animated moving across the scene then added a noise modifier on the Graph Editor to make it look like the can was bobbing on to of the water.

For the Night portion of this scene, I had to complete the day scene, camera animation and all, so that I could then do a duplicate of of the scene change the lighting and add the northern lights, this way I can blend the scenes together by changing the opacity.

So for the night scene. I removed the HDRI and added a very large sphere to the background and removed most of it so all that was left was a sort of curved plane. Then I added a series of noise textures in the shader editor. When a colour ramp is added it manipulates the noise texture, so I could make stars and kind of nebulous clouds in the sky

I found this tutorial below that helped me create the Northern Lights. It started off by being a cube that I subdivided and the added loop cuts to create these curved rectangle shapes. I duplicated them so there were a few, this was the basis for the shape.

Then the rest of the magic is of course in the shade editor. Using a series of noise texture nodes, colour ramp nodes that are blended using the overlay and screen node, this creates a series of striped looking lights. Then using the W value in those noise textures, it can be animated to looking like moving lights.

The final part was to add the can “looking sad”. I did this but duplicating the glacier scene at night and adding a camera above the can looking down at it. I add a few lights to illuminate the can a bit better. Then I added water droplets using an addon I had purchased for the Dutty Juice advert. I animated a water droplet moving down the can to kind of make it look like it was crying. I had to render this on the uni computer as the addon didn’t work using render farm

Final Thoughts and Final Renders

I was really happy with this scene. I had to re-render it a few times as the colours didn’t look right the first time. I also had a few iteration of the scene where that curved glacier didn’t exist but in the end I felt like it was needed as a point of focus.