Week 3

During the third week I redesigned the arches in my walkway to be taller and angular that complimented the movement within the space better and gave a more panoramic view of the finale scene. I continued modelling my sea creatures at this point, beginning with the jellyfish and made them bioluminescent as I had painted them in my concept art during the idea development.

redesign of the arches in the walkway

jellyfish- top view

looking through the camera

I added a similar glowing material texture to the body of the jellyfish and a bloom effect over this on blender in material view that increased the visibility of the sea creatures when seen in the rendered view.

Shark model- wireframe view

After this I moved onto the shark and I modelled this one in parts with the fins and main body being two separate meshes to texture them differently. The final object to model was my humpback whale and I used three different references for this one to get the distribution of its weight in its body correctly that guided its motion upward. After I modelled the main body I duplicated it and the fins and tail then brought it below the first mesh to create the two tone texture we see in the lower and upper body of the large mammal.

material view of the shark

material view of the humpback whale model

The final part of this process was animating the models and placing them in the scene and I did this by looking through my camera view to make sure they were within the frame and positioned at the right angle. All the jellyfish were slightly rotated upwards as this is how they usually swam. The school of puffer fish were the only creatures on the right hand side as the shark was the apex predator emerging from the left, leaving my aerial view empty for the humpback whale to glide over the camera.

animating the movement of sea creatures

top view of whale in rendered view

The first creature I animated was the jellyfish by placing multiple rigs parented to its tentacles that mimicked the motion of it lifting its body to swim upwards. The simplest to animate was the shark with its rapid head movements guiding its body forward and swishing its tail in the opposite direction, making the movement fast and unhinged however it was not meant to be a threatening presence as stereotyped in films.

jellyfish model

animating the individual rigs parented to the tentacles