The ocean scene was one of my favourite to work on however, took the most iterations to get to the final result. I wasn’t sure on how to achieve that ocean look of the surface of the water moving.
For the Previs I did a rough composition of what I wanted the scene to look like. I like the idea of the camera being quite low, almost at the waters surface and watching the can sink. Obviously, the water in this scene was just a plane and was not dynamic at all, however, I liked the HDRI in the background and the colours used.
I found this tutorial (below) by Ryan King and he showed how to utilise the Ocean Modifier in Blender to create an effect that looked like the surface of the ocean. I simply selected a plane and the modifier was applied. I adjusted the scale of the waves, the choppiness of the waves etc. It was really easy to achieve the desired result with the modifier.
With the help of the tutorial, I was able to set up the scene and adjust it to how I wanted it to look like for my FMP.
The image on the left shows how the scene looked in Blender. I used a Cube scaled it up to cover the entire scene. I added a Principled Volume shader to the cube to simulate fog.
Another great addon that Blender has is A.N.T Landscape which when activated can create different looking landscapes like mountains, cliff edges etc. After selecting the mountain landscape, I also then can change the look by change the main parameters.
Then the final touches to the scenery were the sky, which was just the sky presets in Blender, which again have main parameters, the colour can be changed, the atomsphere, fog, sun direction etc. I then put a Circle mesh in the sky. I then put an emission texture on the this disk to imitate a sun.
The final scene set up is below. There was something about this scene that didn’t look like right. I did alot to play with the colours but I thought that the scene needed a HDRI. Also I wasn’t keen on this composition. I liked the stylised look but it was maybe too stylised.
Change
So I took what I learnt from the tutorial and re-did the composition to make it look more dynamic. I wanted to keep the landscapes in the background. But again I ended up changing that too. Below is a video of how I put together the composition.
I used the Ocean Modifier again on a plane. From there it I could adjust the parameters so that they could be the kind of Ocean surface I wanted it to be.
Camera and Can Animation
I then wanted the movement of the can and the camera to be dynamic and match the choppiness of the water. I got a plane and used a Shrink Wrap Modifier and linked this plane to the Ocean plane. This meant that this second plane mimicked the movement of the ocean. From there I was able to do use a Copy Location Constraint from the camera to the second plane. This meant that the camera followed the movement of the ocean, making it look more dynamic. Then I did the same with the can and used an empty with another constraint and used that to make the can move in the z axis to make it look like it was sinking.
Final thoughts and issues
Finally I was happy with the composition of this scene and added a HDRI and a Sun Light in a warm orangey, yellow colour to make it look like a sunset.
I wanted to add a spray effect on the Ocean plane to make it really look like water, but due to the slowness of my computer I wasn’t able to achieve that. I also adjusted the colour of the HDRI and when I eventually rendered the scene, the sea look very very red, which was not the look I was going for, but instead of re-rendering, I decided to change it in aftereffects.