I’ve not posted up a project for a little while so i thought i would share my progress with this one, Its a group of sea shells partially buried in the sand, and the tide has just started to come in.
I feel there are a few things wrong with this, and i have some stuff left to check off my to-do list - i.e - improving the geometry of the water and the beach. I think my seashells may need there materials altering too but i’m not sure. I also think i may of gone overboard on the post production as well.
Anyone have any comments/critiques for me? as usual i would be delighted to hear them
Please click the image for a larger view. You cant see the details on the thumbnail image
The ribbed part of shells is a lot more curved than the shells in the image, and water washing over them or wind removes sand from between the ribs. At waters edge there would be: wet sand under water; damp sand where waves wash over sand; dry sand. The image does not appear to have any damp sand. The very edge of the water shows a bead from surface tension. Since sand is porous, any surface tension beading would be on individual grains of sand, and be much too small to notice.
The referance image that i am using does not appear to have much curvature on the ribbed sections, that is why mine look the way they do. The shell i am referencing is rather flat and the ribs appear more rectangular looking than curved, there is a curve but it is not very smooth.
Here is my reference image -
After looking at other references of sea shells though, it seems that this one is the least curved i could possibly find, all the others looked a lot smoother… so i will probably use proportional editing and smooth vertex to get smoother curves across the ribs.
I plan to add darker looking wet sand close to the tide, i actually completely forgot about that so thanks for reminding me lol. I think im going to use vertex paint as a mix factor in the sand shader to achieve that look, use it to mix in a darker and glossier version of the original sand shader to give it that damp look where the tide has rolled in.
As for the beading, i think that is an issue of the geometry of the tide and the beach meshes overlapping. The water is a plane that i shaped into a tide like shape, and then displaced with the ocean modifier… so really there shouldn’t be any beading, as the water is one solid mesh with no holes. Unless by tension beading you mean the thickness at the very edge of the water line? That is an issue I noticed after uploading. this is what i know water beading to be -
There are a couple of highlights along the water’s edge (circled in red) which show the ‘beading’ I was talking about, although, in general, the whole edge, examined closely, seems to have a slight curved thickness. It’s the sort of edge I’d expect to see in a pool of water on some impermeable surface. I used the term ‘beading’ since I’m not sure what it should be called, and ‘surface tension effect’ is ambiguous. Yeah, it’s the thickness of the edge at the waterline.
It could, of course, be the leading edge of a tiny ‘wave’ as the water moves from upper left to lower right. It might read more like that once the damp sand is in place, showing the effects of earlier ‘waves’.
I’ve never seen shells quite so flat, but it’s hard to argue with a photographic reference. I guess I’ve just never been to a beach where those critters live.
Thanks for taking the time to create and post an image for me
The areas you have circled are definatley in need of work, and the thickness at the edge of the water line makes the liquid seem more viscous than it should be. it looks thick and almost sticky to me.
I do hope that adding the damper bits of sand will improve the look of the water, but i think that i may have to apply my solidify modifier, and make the mesh taper as it gets closer to the edge.
I also referenced a few shells that i have in my room, they are rather flat also. This whole thing may be down to the fact that you live in America and i live in England… So we probably see very different shells to one another at the beach
Thanks man i appreciate you taking the time to comment
I’ve been working on this scene a lot trying to get the water looking right, and it is just simply more trouble than it is worth. I’ve decided I should probably just remove it from the scene completely.
I thought that before i do that, i should ask to see if anyone has any effective methods for making a tide? i’ve tried everything i can think of and just can’t get it to look right? Anyone have any ideas?
I’ve removed the tide from the scene. Now it is supposed to look like the tide has recently rolled out and left a starfish stranded on the beach.
I have a lot of work left to do on the starfish:
. Need to re-do the texture paint and make it seem more “Realistic” somehow.
. Need to slightly edit the geometry, the “Arms” of the star should taper slightly towards the points. And also the ridges on the skin don’t look how i wanted them too just yet.
. Need to make a good material, so far it’s a basic Diffuse/SSS/Glossy
Also i need to edit my beach material, to make the wet sand look more realistic.
And i need to re-position the shell at the top left of the image. I thought i already had, but clearly not because it still looks weird.
When the tide rolls in, it brings ocean foam with it
And when it rolls out it leaves some of the foam behind… some of it trapped behind the starfish
It’s unlikely the starfish would be sitting in a little private damp spot: the wave energy constantly diminishes as the wave rolls in, at some point it would not be deep or strong enough to continue to push the starfish, but it would still be strong enough to keep going a little ways further. IOW, the damp left behind by the wave wouldn’t have a little projection like that, it would be more in line with the rest of the dampness, and the starfish would be dropped somewhere oceanside of the leading edge of the wave.
Ocean foam is one of the hardest things i’ve ever tried to make, i tried before and it looked terrible.
I will keep having a go to see if i can get it to look right, but i have my doubts… Foam is a complicated material it has transparency, volume, translucency, reflection, refraction and probably more properties that i haven’t mentioned. Getting it to look realistic is difficult, but i guess thats what i signed up for when i started to make a beach scene lol…
The other things you mentioned are easy for me to implement, but the foam is going to be a struggle for me. Gonna get working on some improvements tonight and hopefully have a new render to show for it by tomorrow.
Someone modeled a tall glass of hard cider that had some pretty decent foam clinging to the glass. Forget which forum, maybe Finished Projects. Within the past few days.
so thanks for reminding me lol. I think im going to use vertex paint as a mix factor in the sand shader to achieve that look, use it to mix in a darker and glossier version of the original sand shader to give it that damp look where the tide has rolled in.
