#Whales
Hi David,
Well I'm finally uploading something now re: the underwater
discussions we've had. It's just a 55 frame excerpt at 256×150, but
is large enough to tell a little bit about my experiment with the
projector lights to emulate refractive caustics on the dolphin body,
the bubbles following the dolphin, and a brief look at some schooling
fish (look very closely to see some further away from the camera
masked by the distance and murky water emulation) This whole thing
started as an extremely simple test just for experimenting with fog,
blur, projector light, and some other techniques for trying to create
an underwater look with depth. It is still extremely simple and I'm
sure can be greatly refined.
At the very last moment, I added a reef of sorts and made a first
attempt at emulating the internal caustics and turbulence of the
*implied* volume of water. I had to remove the mapping and lighting
for the reef, as well as remove the mapping from everything else
other than the faked water caustics attempt in order to reduce the
flic size. Even so, with a/a and shadows and motion blur off, and
maximum zip compression, it's still 800k+ and decompresses to 1.9MB
or so. Nothing is set-up properly, and you can see the dolphin "crash
through" my fake environment at the end of the flic if you look
closely.
As I said before, all of the objects are just simple stand-ins for
the real thing whenever I get around to it, and the motion / timing
of the moving objects is far from being worked out. That having been
said, I am surprised at how easy it was to get a "look" such as this
with 3DS after only a couple of hours complete construction time
(excluding rendering, and especially testing and modification in
order to try to reduce the flic size). The last minute addition of
the murky, caustic, turbulent water emulation was a bit of a surprise
as I had not even rendered 1 frame to test my simple concept for
doing this.
As simple as this is, and with minimum effort, it has motivated me
to try to create an underwater animation, which I've never done
before. The only problem is that this simple / reduced / minimized
test maxed out the 32MB physical RAM in the machine and went into
virtual ???? And there's only about 20k faces and 1 small bitmap for
the projector ???? Something's not right.
If if get a chance and if it's not too large to download, take a look – and
remember, you said you won't laugh <g>.
Regards,
Bill