CompuServe Thread

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