Assignment - June - Phase 7 : Finishing Touches

With the dolphin now in place, and victory on the tip of my tongue... it was time to polish and make the finishing touches to the image...

The first thing to do was fix the snout, as there was a little 'ridge' in it which showed up on rendering. Luckily, it was only a few out-of-place vertices, which was quickly amended.

The background seemed a little bit bare though. A plain blue worked nicely as a placeholder, but needed something with a little bit more kick to it...

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!!!!!