This was another underwater section for the environmental scene in the project. As I was looking for inspiration for the coral scene and came across some images of kelp forests. I loved the idea of the “God rays” coming through the kelp and the richness of the greens. I wanted a scene showing the can sinking for the ocean surface going downwards and thought this was a good opportunity to implement that scenery.
However, the scene didn’t start off that way. At first, I just want the Can to sink with the camera looking up from the bottom of the scene. I used the Ocean Modifier in Blender and added it to a plane.
I then used the shader editor to make a water like texture to the plane. The Ocean modifier animates a plane to move like the surface of an Ocean. There are different setting to make the water more violent or calm. I added a cube and again, used the shader editor to add a volume to the cube to simulate underwater. Again, like in the coral scene I used a caustics light over the plane and set up the camera.
Influences
I found these images and from there wanted to change the original scene (above) to something more like the images below. I thought it would make it more realistic and I loved the greens of the kelp.
I love the god rays coming through the Kelp is something that I want to achieve.
Modelling the Kelp
I started off using a plane and adding Loop Cuts, then manipulating the vertices to make them into a leaf shape. After this I stretched out an Icosphere to make the bulb part, then lastly was simply a cylinder to create the stem. I used the array modifier to duplicate these objects and make them tall like kelp.
I went into sculpting mode to then make the leaves have imperfections.
Animating the Kelp
I applied the Array modifier so that they were all one object, then duplicated and grouped some stems together. I added a Wave modifier to simulated the leaves shifting in the water. Then I added a Simple Deform modifier and set one to Bend and one to Twist to make the plants look like they were swaying. I offset the kelp swaying for each group so they weren’t all uniform and that was it!
Final Touches
To conclude the Kelp, I added a colour ramp to the Base Colour so that I could have several colours, mostly shades of green. I also added a Translucent BSDF to make the plants look more translucent and have that lovely effect of the light pasting through them.
I then added a couple of particle systems to make it look like there was debris floating in the water. This coupled with the volumetrics plus the low Depth of Field I think sold the underwater effect.
To animate the Can I simply added Location and Rotation keys. I had a plan to have the movement of the can effected by the Ocean Modifier plane that was at the top of the scene, So I added a Copy Location Constraint to the Can from the plane, but in the end it didn’t seem as necessary and difficult to control so I change my mind.
As a final touch, I added a plane that was situated underneath the can. I added a Metallic materal to the plane so that it could provide a bit of lighting as the can seemed a bit too dark from down below.
Playing around with the colours in this scene took a long time. For me, it was crucial that the kelp was that golden green and the surroundings were that kind of more of a blue colour. A few things effected this, the colour of the volume, the colour of the lights (there was the caustic light and the Sun light) and then the World colour which was also a volume scatter to intensify the underwater feel. In the end after alot of adjusting I was happy with the World colour and the Volume Scatter in the cube to be a aqua blue and the lights were a desaturated yellow. This helped lift the greens of the kelp. The image below was the final render.
Issues
The first render came out weird as the particle system was messed up so some of the particles wouldn’t move correctly. But I went back into the scene and adjusted the settings so they floated down rather that whizzed around like they did in the first render.