Recently I started a small fun project. For some reason I got attracted to icebergs, humpback whales and how it all looks together.
The goal of this is a small animation (around 30 secs).
After two days I had the iceberg and humpback whale ready and after another couple days I fiddeled with materials and colors so much, that I finally don’t want to do more.
First I wanted to use some real SSS for the icebergs which looked nice, but took way to long to render:
Then I managed to fake it using some fresnel, compositor and a lot of fiddeling and brought rendertimes down to something usefull. I also added the whale, posed it and added some particles floating around:
It’s very realistic. The surface of the water looks a bit off in the second picture, you might want to look at some reference images. Looking good so far!
@Blenderfan: you’re right about the water surface. I have a lot of refs lying around. Will have to tweak that now. aaah more tweaking.
@mziskandar: thanks. But I won’t put volume light in. First of all, it will slow down render times and is tricky to setup to work nicely, and second, I never intended to add it into that scene. It would fit into a tropical or subtropical sea, but not in the artic, where water is not full of sand and other particles that can reflect light in that way.
Looks really good. Maybe you should compromise on the render times and use SSS for the icebergs, it creates a much more realistic result. Would you mind sharing the material set up for the Icebergs with the sub surface scattering?
I can share shure. If I remember the settings. However using SSS is no option for me. It takes more then an hour for one frame while faking it takes 15minutes. If I want to render out an animation of 30 seconds (around 720 frames) I can’t render 30 days in a row.
It looks very nice!
One thing I noticed is the it looks almost like whale is floating in nothing.
I am not totally sure how to add the that effect honestly, but someone probably does.
But it is nicely detailed and such.
Sorry, I don’t have a whole lot of experience with Blender, but I am learning fast.
–Edit–
You might be able to do it using a map value in the compositor though.
Use an RGB Curve to make the map value a bluish-greenish color just so the tail of the whale is a little murkier than the front.
Right now the whale just looks a bit to clear.
So this thing is rendering as I write this. Rendering since 2 days and might need one more to finish. I tried rendering it at renderfarm.fi but I got an error as it tried a test rendering. Does someone else had this problem?
I’m a bit unsure how the water surface animation will turn out. Hopefully not too bad. I’m using a regular cloud texture I only move along X. This might end up looking ugly and if so I will need to re-render the water layer.
If someone has a good advice on how to create animated water surface please write it down.
For the first time I’m also rendering out to MultiLayer exr. Which gives me complete control in the compositor after frames are rendered as every single render layer and every single channel in each render layer are contained. However on half HD resolution, that I’m rendering at, one single frame is 35mb and I have a total of 1300 frames. You get the math? Lucky as I am I have an external HD I can dump those Gigs at.
As the animation reached 1300 frames the final thing will be a bit about a minute I guess. I already gathered all needed sound effects and will do the ambient music on my own. I think that will be a fun part.
Good news. Rendering finished tonight and the end result is looking nice. Even the animated water surface is pretty much as I hoped it to turn out. Tomorrow I might start with the music and sound for it.
Just for future reference in case you’re planning on doing some more computing intensive work you could check out Renderfarm.fi. Some 3000 volunteer CPU’s waiting for your command.
I already know renderfarm.fi and sometimes I offer my CPUs for it too. I tried to setup my render with it in the first place but got an error during rendering of a test frame. As nothing told me what the source of the error could be I left it as is and rendered on my own computer.
