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Created with a light-dark blue gradient, the watery effect was created with the 'glass' texture effect under the 'filter' options in Photoshop. This helped to create more of the 'rippled' texture, which would work better as a background, seen as the surface wouldn't be still.
And so it was placed into the scene. At the time, this was the finished product (and was at the time of my 'Stop the Clock' post)... However, when I looked at this image next to the previous 2... it seemed a lot weaker and lacked the 'impact' I wanted. Yes, the 3D work was there, and arguably better than the other 2... but it just didn't look as awesome... The background was the weak link here. I had to concede that I needed to find a suitable image to act as the backdrop...
And looky looky what I found from 'All the Web' (Google can kiss the seat of my pants). This absolutely beautiful underwater image immediately caught my eye for obvious reasons. I had to use it as the backdrop. It was just perfect!
This is it placed onto the scene fresh from the interweb. An exceedingly superior version the custom-built one! The lens glow was also centred to match the light source. Unfortunately, the sand was too high. This made the water look a little bit too shallow for dolphins and jellyfish to safely swim. Animal welfare is a high priority, even in the 3D world.
And so, a little bit of cropping later... and there it is! Now the denizens of the deep look like they're a little bit deeper in the water.
And there we have it! The 3D image for June! Now that's a Sunday well spent! Makes ridiculous amount of hours work seem quite worthwhile, if I do say so myself. Phew! Job done.
And that's that! Aside from tweaks here and there... that is the assignment completed. Looks like my work here is done. Until next time...
Captain Pineapple... away!!!!!
And so I sat down with a few sketches and pictures of dolphins, as I attempted to create one from a sphere. The number of segments was bumped up to around 70, as there'd be a lot of editing going on; and I didn't want a lack of vertices making things difficult! Pulling the sphere out into this submarine-like shape was a safe start. Save. Handy starting point.
A little bit of pulling here and there to create more a fish shape. In particular, the tail was worked on. (The snout was to be built separately. I tried it from the sphere, and it just made things really, really messy.)
As the head of the dolphin was pulled from the sphere shape, a pair of eyes were added to the body. Though not a dolphin... the body is at least fishy. Another good place to save.
Fins were then added. The dorsal fin by far the easier to implement. After a failed attempt or 2 with a flattened sphere; it was several times easier to create a fun shape with the line tool and extrude it. (Sometimes, the simpler methods are the most effective...)
The pectoral fins (I'm sure those are the ones...) are sneaky clones of the dorsal fin. Hey, I already made a fin... why make 2 more when I can just clone that one?
Mr dolphin was now coming along quite nicely. Looks a little bit like a shark though...
The tail fin was then added. Again, these were made from clones of the dorsal fin, and edited to fit.
Whilst editing... it became clear that the dolphin would look best from a side-profile shot, like the image above. For this to be viable, the dolphin's body had to be arced around slightly, so more of it faced the camera. Luckily, the 'Bones' tool was here to save the day!
After all this, it was time to work on the worst bit... the snout. It was started off in a similar style to the crow from September's image. A single cone formed the starting point.
From here, its vertices were edited and pulled about until it looked less like a cone and more like a dolphin's snout. To get rid of the annoying mess of rounded vertices at the end of the snout (3DS Max is rubbish with rounded edges...) I resorted to creating a rounded block and ProBoolean'ing it out of the end, and then filling the gap with a sphere. The lower snout was simply a smaller clone of the upper one (Rotated, of course).
Now dolphins are perceived to be very happy creatures (That's because their snout makes them look like they're smiling! For all we know, they might be miserable inside...). Either way, it was time to add a little smile to the creature. A careful bit of point rotation made this possible.
The base of the snout was then fitted with another sphere, to help even out the transition between the snout and the body. Previously, the snout looked like it had literally been stuck on the end of the body with superglue. This little 'filler' slightly helped to mould the 2 together. (or just look like superglue that had leaked out of the sides...). Either way, this was the finished article
And there it is! Luckily, it didn't really need any texturing. The skin was the right colour and reflected the light sufficiently. Any further textures added to it actually ruined the image more than it helped it. So there it is... Mr Dolphin with Dolphin Junior swimming beside it. Aww... doesn't it just make you want to throw up?
Starting with a commonly-seen friend (You know the ones. The one you see all to often and soon get secretly sick of), an editable sphere formed the basis for this one. However, instead of the normal routine of pulling the vertices out... I basically pushed half of it in on itself. There is a reason for this, rather than hemisphering it...
Pulling the edges a little bit more to create more of a flowing jelly-like body... I had the main head of the jellyfish done. Time to test out a few textures on it... translucent shader with opacity turned down low. And there's the result! Now you can see why I pushed it in on itself: The inner segment added a little bit more to the translucency, and helped to create more of a strange pattern, than just a see-through dome.
A sphere that had the vertices pushed about here, there and everywhere and generally made a complete mess of; formed a nice blob for the 'innards' of the jellyfish. Blast that with some translucent shader and...
There we go! A luminous inside of a jellyfish. That's pretty much the top part taken care of. All that's left is the tentacles.
These were made a lot like the coral branches from a few posts ago. A single cylinder, filled with several bones. To save a bit of time, the tentacles were cloned after the first one had been curved and made into a more naturalistic tentacle shape. This helped save a lot of fiddling about afterwards!
And there it is! With the tentacles now blasted with a bit of TurboSmooth, the jellyfish was all set to make its home in the watery depths being constructed for it.
And there it is! The textures were worked on since it was placed into the scene. The dome worked a lot better with a magenta tinge to it. And that's the bottom half of the scene taken care of!.jpg)
Now this is jumping ahead a bit. I'm afraid this was one of those "Let's try this out.. oh WOW! I'm keeping that!" moments. The clam was textured with a few simple patterns (Running a long similar lines to the coral), and a few bubbles were also made (Spheres coated with a texture that had 0 opacity and a high specular level)
I also wanted to give lighting a quick test. So, in a similar style to previous images, I placed a couple of 'omni' lights around to give the whole scene some light, and created a spotlight to act as the main source of lighting for the scene. All the lights were given a blue tint to them, as well as the environment light being given a turquoise edge. In addition, some volume fog was also added (Albeit very little. Around 0% Near - 34% far, if my memory serves me well). Not bad for a quick playabout...
Instead of working from flattened spheres or lines, like the last bunch... this one was started off with a box of all shapes. The segments were all bolstered, to give me more points to move about and work with. Starting off nice and easy, entire rows/columns of vertices were moved up, and others down, creating the zig-zag pattern seen here. As you can see: Zig-zag lips and grooves both taken out with one stone! Literally a minute job!
This is when it got slower. This was all about sitting down and pulling points here and there. Raise some, drop others and squeeze them into place. A few were even rotated. That's one thing I only just discovered... When editing the vertices (the blue dots), you can rotate selections as well as moving them! Sweet!
Taking the shell shape, it was cloned and flipped. There it is! A basic clam shape! Hmm... looks a little... 'rough', for want of a better word. Needs something... what if we hit it with a little bit of 'TurboSmooth'...?
Perfect! Now that's really fixed it a treat! Talk about good luck!
All it needed now, was a pair of smoochable lips. Simply made from a cylinder (With more segments for more editing goodness), and then cloned... they were planted and moulded around the front of the clam.
And there it is! Nestling comfortably on the rock. Aside from a bit of texture to the clam... that's pretty much the reef taken care of! Job done!
I'd just like to say now... I hate coral. Not the betting shop or the people... but the barnacle-infested lumps of God-knows-what. They are hell to create in 3DS Max... anyhoo, I started off with a simple cylinder. Up the segments to create more points to work with.
Next step was to simply fan out the bottom of the coral (Perhaps making it from a cone would have been somewhat wiser...) and 'denting' the top of it. So far, so good.
Here's where it became "fun"... 'fun' in the sense of "Lets poke our eyes with pointy objects" fun. The task was to manipulate the trunk of coral, adding other 'branches' of coral to it... all without making any of it look phallic... but still looking like coral. This wasn't as easy as it sounded...
... a little while later. I had something that looks like this. Sorta like a kicked-in cactus. No matter. It's going to small, and there's going to be a lot of it!
Just to spice things up (and make our rock look really stylish!), I decided to add some more coral. This time, it was the turn of the long, branch-like coral. To start with, I prepared myself with 5 straws, all filled with bones and ready to tweak. A few attempts taught me that it's easier to clone the first cone and make several copes before you start adding more of them...
A couple more clones, mugs of coffee and Coldplay songs later... I had something that looked a little bit like this. Actually, tell a lie... I had something that looked exactly like this. And there it is! The pieces of coral, all set to spruce up the lonely rock!
And there it is! A stunner to female rocks everywhere. Tons of coral clones, all rotated and moved into different positions... you wouldn't realise it was all the same piece of coral!
It was time to add a little bit of texture. First up was to get a nice rock texture. A bit of photoshop work would make a nice coating for the rock... or... I could just recycle the one I used for May...
No, these patterns are not cut-outs from my latest jumpers knitted for me by my nan... They are in fact the textures for the coral. How were they made? In both cases, they were started off with the 'go nuts with a low opacity brush' technique I have pretty much used for every texture so far. They were hit with an 'Add Noise' filter, and finished off by sitting there and adding dots to it with the paint brush tool.
Now we're talking! There's also now a nice little gap for something that vaguely resembles a clam... hmm... perhaps a clam?
Starting off with a line tool. set to 'corner' and 'bezier'. In other words, it creates pointy corners; unless you drag the line, in which case it becomes a curve (with bezier handles: meaning that you can come back and edit the arc of the curve later!). A simple strand was created... mmm... that hot chocolate is nice...
And suddenly, they've multiplied! Did I really sit there and create several of them? No, of course not. They're all edited copies of the original! In fact, if you look really closely, the smaller 2 on the far right are exactly the same as the 2 strands on the left of the centre one!
Now, the weeds get stuffed with lots of bones. Why? It allows me to tweak and bend them! In other words, the weeds can now ripple as if they are moving in the water. I attempted to twist the weeds, so they were like spirals... but 3DS Max wasn't too co-operative with that... ripples it is then.
And there it is! Simple rotation of the bones now means we have a nice set of seaweed that's gently swaying in the ocean current... aww... you'd almost forget that it was incredibly slimy... Let's see how out rock looks with some of these babies on it!
Now isn't that much nicer? See how happy the rock looks?