I duplicated the Coral Reef scene and used that to create this anemone scene. I eliminated the hermit crab idea so I wanted a different animal to interact with the can to show the impact of littering on animals as well as the environment. I had come across this photo of a coke can when I was looking for references.
I found the tutorial below which used geometry nodes to create a procedural animation. By using a Set Position node in addition to a noise texture, and adding math nodes to displace those values, I quickly started to get the fish to swim fluidly.
It was cool to customise the nodes to make it kind of look like the fish was swimming around the can.
Below is a screen recording of me playing around with the nodes to get a the fish to move around how I liked.
Anemone
I really wanted have something else in the environment to add to the coral so thought anemone would achieve the look I was going for. I started off by using a rig but I found another tutorial that used geometry nodes and thought as the scene was already so heavy, this would be a better way to add movement to the anemone object without making the scene heavier.
I started off by adding a Sphere and by going into Edit Mode I scaled it up and moved the verts around using Proportional Editing to create an Anemone shape.
After this I started using adding an armature to the Anemone but found the tutorial underneath.
In the tutorial the use a Cone as their instanced object and use many many more duplicates than I did, So to customise it I used an Object Data node and used the object I modelled which was one anemone strand.
By using a Position Node and adding a noise texture to that, I used math nodes to control the movement of the anemone. After playing around with the math nodes, the anemone starts to move in this “swirly” kind of way. I played with the different axis too until I got the effect I was looking for.
Anemone Materials
After the movement of the anemone was down, I started playing around with the materials. Because it was all linked to the one object, it was really easy to play around and create a material, which then would effect the whole anemone group. So I decided to do a peachy colour but then liked the idea of the tops being more glow in the dark to light the underneath of the can. I know its not realistic, but I thought it was still in keeping to the semi-stylised look.
Finishing Touches
The Can and the rest of the scene was just duplicated so it was just a case of moving things around, but cans animation was basically the same as the last scene. There was a bit of a noise animation to make it look like it was floating but that was it.
Issues
This scene wasn’t as heavy as the Coral Reef scene, as after I duplicated it, I just deleted most of the rocks and other object that weren’t in the scene. But there was still the issue of being able to look and check everything in real time as it was still quite a heavy scene. I liked the final render, and I knew that I could change the colours slightly if needs be in after effects.