I’ve spent a few hours creating a whale to use as set dressing on a little anim project of mine.
He turned out so well, I decided to challenge myself and see if I could give him a realistic looking home.
I got a lot of the inspiration from the old ‘Bongo’ tut that was posted a while ago. The rest I kind of made up as I went along.
The plan is to put some fish and some rocks in there and have a small animation of him swimming past the camera.
Critique would be gratefully appreciated.
great render dude!
my crit would be on the sea bed - the sand ripples look too small and precise
I also can’t see the fish at all
(a whale is a mammal 
)
Try this: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/ for caustics instead of procedurals. Your method looks a bit unreal due to black dots in some places, I would suggest tweaking color ramps. Maybe you should scale texture, ripples over whale on surface are much larger than projected caustics elements.
A whale won’t swim in shallow water like yours, only other crit except of the caustics would be the lines you sculpted on its belly. I looks euhm sculpted…
But would love to see the bigger scene.
edit: And I don’t think that those bubbles would be round. They should be a bit more like this http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/744/162500.JPG
Increase the size of the “wave texture” on the whale and add some composition nodes to smoothen out the overall image feeling…
I think if you back away from the whale it might give the water a greater depth-feel. Plus, it may get a more-documentary-realistic camera feel if you’re not right on top of it.
That looks pretty damn good to me!
From here I would be experimenting with varients-for example trying out different colour schemes, different models, adding more fish rocks etc.
Pretty good so far. You definitely need to tweak the caustics though. If you want to do them procedurally, I’d suggest increasing the size and then adding another texture (distorted noise?) to warp it. Play around with it.
Also on that subject, if I’m not mistaken, there would be caustics on the seabed as well.
great job
are you using HDRI or it just a plane with texture for the water surface?
my comment:
no caustic on the ground? maybe it’s a deep one
make some noise :evilgrin:
I mean crowded (fish and coral reef)
The width of the waves and the reflection of them on the whale doesn’t match…
