Author: Caroline James

Reference

I wanted to create an underwater scene where the Can sinks to the bottom of the ocean. In the original previs, the can is shown at the bottom of a body of water with plants swaying around. However, I wanted the water scenes to be split into different sections to demonstrate the journey the Can is on. So for this scene I just concentrated on a coral reef kind of scene.

I started gathering pictures for inspiration:

I liked the composition of these images and wanted to carry the cavern feel through to my scene. I started with using a subdivided Icosphere and using the Displace modifier, which made some rough rock shapes. By moving the location of the rocks it changes the shape. I duplicated these objects and changed the shape and scale to create a rocky landscape. The tutorial below helped me learn how to create the rocks quickly.

I used a plane and then added a texture that I found to create the bottom of the sea floor. I used the shader editor to add a

I then used a texture map and there is a cool short cut in Blender, Ctrl+Shift+T which allowed me to bring up file on the computer and then select a roughness, colour and normal map.

I then used Proportional Editing and in edit mode I selected the verts to create dips and rises in the plane.

Modelling Coral

Using the images I collected of different coral reefs, to create those shapes I started modelling the coral using Icospheres. After subdividing I either extruded the faces, extruded the faces and the scales them down or used the Inset tool then scaled down, the extruded in. All have unique shapes. Some were simply just Icospheres cut in half. One of the shapes that weren’t icosheres were disk like shapes that I created from scaling a subdivided cylinders.

I then duplicate these shapes and began to place them around the scene to create the composition. Once I was happy with the comp I started on creating textures.

Procedural Textures

I love procedural textures! I wanted to create a texture over the rocks. There were many rocks in weird shapes so thought it would be an easier way than UV unwrapping the objects.

I found this tutorial for a coral rock material

I modified the rocks and added different colour versions to fit the scene. Whilst finding the rock texture tutorial, I found the tutorial below on coral texture also. From there, it gave me a good basics to play around with the nodes to customise it for the scene.

I also used the tutorial below to create a coral texture and adjusted it to customise and make several different versions

This is one of the node trees for one of the coral textures.

After the textures were applied this is what the scene looked like below.

The last step of the scene was to add lighting to the scene. I added sun lights but I needed some caustics to simulate light hitting the water. I found this tutorial

It started off as an emission shader with two voronoi textures connected to an emission shader and using different value nodes to adjust the scale, smoothness and randomness and then using the animating the revolutions or the movement using the W factor. After that it was just able adjusting the timing. This caustics was done using a Spot Light. Then I just played with the position, angulation and the colour of the Spot light.

Finishing Touches

I added a Cube to the scene to create an atmosphere. I added a Principle Volume shader along with a Musgrave texture to make the volume denser and lighter in different areas

I also played around with the colour to compliment the comp and the light. I also added a couple of area lights. I also add a F-Stop of 2.0 with the focus object being the can.

Animation

I added a noise modifier to the camera and the can. This gave them both a subtle wiggle animation to make it look more dynamic in the water. I then added a location and rotation animation to the can to make a really lower moving animation of the can moving through the water. I wanted the can to move from left to right to match up with the other scene I was planning on doing to keep consistency and demonstrate the consent move journey the can is on.

Issues

I think because the scene was so heavy it was really hard to load it on my computer and check what it would look like using cycles and therefore what it would look like when it was rendered. It made the computer very slow and slow to create the scene by the end.

I also had to do the file conversion thing so that it would render on the university renderfarm. Again this took time to open the file in Blender 3.0 change the broken shaders.

The final render is below

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.

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.

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.

One of the more simpler scenes that I did was the scene with the Can going under the ice. I wanted it to be a scene that linked the underwater scenes to the glacier scene to emphasise the change in climate.

Procedural texture

Since my last project, I really started to understand and enjoy using procedural textures. I love how customisable they can be compared to textures that can be downloaded online. So I found a tutorial online by Ryan King Art on YouTube.

Using a mixture of a Voronoi Texture and a Musgrave texture is what achieves this look, alond with a Colour Ramp with controls the size of the cracks in the ice.

From there, I wanted to scene to be quite simple, just a sheet of ice with the can visibly floating underneath.

I applied the texture to a very large plane. I played around with some of the layout by adding a large cube directly underneath the plane and applied a volume to represent the water underneath the sheet of ice. In the end I change my mind and thought the volume underneath wasn’t necessary.

Below is what the nodes and the scene looked like in Blender.

Then I animated the can going from left to right underneath the ice.

I then added a sun light to the scene in a warm orange light.

Issues

Once I put the scene together, I began to do some test renders in the uni render farm.

The scene should have looked like this…

but looked like this…

It obviously looked completely different when rendered from the render farm. For ages I couldn’t work out why the textures were looking completely different. I used Blender 3.51 to create the scene which was the same version the university computers were using. I knew over the summer that render farm had been updated.

The university techs couldn’t answer why this was happening. I went on the internet and after days of research I found a forum where someone else had the same problem. Someone had suggested that it was because the render farm was using a different version of Blender that was incompatible with the newer version.

So on a whim, I happened to still have an older version of Blender on my computer at home, so I opened the file with the old version and it looked like the bad render. And some of the nodes in the shader editor where not working.

In the newest update of Blender, the nodes in the shader editor have updated, some don’t exist or names have changed slightly, so when an new file version of Blender is opened in a old version, the nodes are displayed as “Undefined”. And those undefined nodes are broken which in turn effect the texture.

So my theory was, like the forum said, if the render farm hadn’t updated properly and was still functioning as an older version of Blender, it was taking my files, which were new versions and breaking the nodes like in the picture above. So I ended up, after opening the file in the older version of Blender (3.00), replacing the nodes with ones still in Blender 3.00, and then making sure I didn’t open them in a newer version as they would automatically switch the file and break everything again.

I tested this updated Blender 3.00 in the render farm and it FINALLY came out normally. It was incredibly frustrating though as all my files were done in Blender 3.51 and I also had addons and rigs that were not compatible with 3.00. It also meant that once the shader nodes were fixed, I could not open that file again on the uni computers as I would be back to square one as it converted the files back. So basically I think the render farm was not up-to-date, but never got an answer in the end. So it meant I had to change every file which took a long time.

Over the summer I started planning out my final major project. Thanks to the work I had did for my previsualisation, I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted to do the project.

This is the previsualisation of the Can Project.

The Logline:

A customer walks into a dank dirty corner shop and unintentionally knocks two cans together, starting a love story between these two cans. One of the cans is eventually brought, beginning a tale love, loss and littering

Idea:

I want to create a short film with a strong emphasis of the human impact of the environment and how our consumerism can have a detrimental effect. Because of this and because I enjoy modelling and texturing, I would like to have a go at modelling alot of the environment.

So over the summer I started to plan what I needed to do. I wanted to stick to the original brief as much as possible. However, I knew I wanted to emphasise the journey that the Can goes on. So in order to do that, I wanted to add more scenes of it travelling in different landscapes. In addition to the underwater scenes, I wanted to add several different underwater scenes, including a kelp forest and a coral reef, as well as the can traveling past a glacier which would be split into day and night scene, a scene of the can under ice, and lastly a scene of the can traveling down a river.

Difficulties

After establishing my scenes, I wanted to sacrifice the scene of the can begin dragged around a beach by a hermit crab. Although I liked the idea of that scene, I wanted to concentrate on the scenery and the modelling of the scenery. Having to animate the hermit crab and have a close up to the hermit crabs legs interacting with the sand would have been too much with the addition of all the other scenes. And I thought it was too important to not include the other scenes. For example, it is known that coral reefs are being destroyed and that glaciers and melting due to the impact of global warming. I still wanted an emphasis on the environmental impact of littering. However, I still wanted to have animals interacting with the Can, so thought if I has time, that I would have a fish in the coral scene swimming around it, as I found this picture of a clown fish…

I thought it was a good way to demonstrate the impact of humanity of the world.

Moodboards

I have been collecting many images to create several moodboards,

A moodboard for a high street aesthetic, one for a corner shop and one for the general colour and feel of the whole film. I added keywords to help me stay on track.

I want a blend of a traditional run down British high street with a colourful Mediterranean twist with shutters and cobblestones.

Influences

There will be no dialogue in this short story. So I need to express alot of what is being “felt” with the music. Something that I thought it what incredibly well is the beginning of Up.  

During the modelling process I want it to look quintessentially British. A run down/ rough looking high street but I want to find the beauty in the ugly!!

The photo below is a picture of an area in Bristol which demonstrates and ties my ideas together.

The picture below is by an artist called Li DeCai who modelled the scene including all the assets themselves.

https://80.lv/articles/a-colorful-stylized-town-set-up-in-unreal-engine-5/

I was really inspired by the stylised look and the beautiful colours. I also like the shabbiness of it, for example, the paint on some of the buildings looks unfinished which adds to the beauty of it in my opinion.