Inspired by this week's collab, "FOUND UNDER THE SEA" topic

[mfortunato]

*EDIT - combined cycles and eevee to get some more reflections in the eyes. It’s not perfect, but it does give a bit more life to their eyes. Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions!

I had so much fun working on last week’s “text” collab that I decided to work on a scene for this week’s topic. I’m so happy with the way it turned out. I’m not as well versed at making characters as I am with hard surface modeling, so this was a challenge. I wanted something that looked like it came from a Pixar film and I think I succeeded. Anyway, hope you all enjoy. If you have any suggestions or criticisms or are curious how I achieved anything, please let me know!

[FedPete]

Beautiful! Showing a a lot of technical skills!

… maybe some turtle reflections, in the octopus eyes …

[Megane_Wang]

A photographer’s hint. We sometimes use light points to “illuminate” the eyes and get a better expression. But controlling what the reflections show is important. In this case, some mutual reflections, e.g. as @FedPete suggests, or reflections of the space they are sharing, would be nice. It integrates the characters together in the same place.

I like your image. I am still working on gray shapes !

[mfortunato]

Thanks for the tips. I do have specific lights setup for their eyes that are set to specular only. That’s how I am getting the large dots of white.
I started experimenting and realized that you cannot see the reflection in the eye because it doesn’t render accurately in EEVEE. I set this up in EEVEE instead of Cycles because I liked the more cartoon-like volume and lighting I was getting in EEVEE. Cycles, because it is more physically accurate, wasn’t giving me the 3D animated look I was going for. When I switched to Cycles and did a test render, I can make out the reflection of the turtle’s face in the octopus’ eye. It’s small, but it is clearly there. Perhaps I’ll blend the two renders together in Photoshop and see what I come up with.

[Megane_Wang]

It’s not a big move… just look at where the octopus is looking at, I think that a relatively small move would help, even if it just shows a bit of the environment . No Photoshop needed .

[mfortunato]

I edited my reply after experimenting a bit more.

[Megane_Wang]

Oh well, after I discovered this sort of “hiccups” with using Evee rendering, I gave up using it and tried to use cycles limiting the render time somehow (my laptop is great for many things, and rendering is not one of them ) and putting lots of patience to practice, so I did not think about it. Good!

[mfortunato]

I love EEVEE and try to use it for everything. I hate waiting
EEVEE’s screen space reflections aren’t accurate so the characters weren’t showing up in each other’s eyes. My poor laptop is going to attempt to render this scene in Cycles but it may take a few hours…and I may have to adjust lights and such since everything was setup to use EEVEE. We’ll see what happens…a long time from now .

[LaniganDev]

Wow i love the style, What way did you do the texturing/shader. I was looking to tryy a similiar style in a game I am working on, If you could give me some tips or pointers.

[mfortunato]

Which shader/texture are you referring to, LaniganDev?
Most of the scene uses procedural shaders within Blender. For the turtle’s skin, I used a combination of procedural shaders and texture painting directly in Blender.
The octopus is using a subsurface scatter shader (it’s one of the default Blender shaders). I just played with the subsurface scattering settings until I got a translucency I liked.
For the background, I wrapped the whole thing in a cube with a principled volume shader on it. I then played with the density settings until I got something I thought worked well for underwater.
To create the god rays, I created a caustics texture in Photoshop and applied it to a plane. I set up a spot light above the plane to shine through the texture, using the plane as a “gobo” for the light to create the god ray effects.
The real trick to this scene is the lighting. There are 6 or 7 lights I set up in the scene. The god ray spot light, some area lights tinted blue to act as rim and fill lights for the characters, some point lights with the diffuse and volume sliders set to 0 so that it only emitted specular light, for their eyes, and a key light just for the characters’ faces.

[LaniganDev]

This is perfect explanition, i was meaning for the characters as they are such a nice style and would like to try and recreate them in the game engine, using similiar shader techniques to get the desired effect.

[Turgul]

Your scene looks great again this week. Don’t forget to post it in the collab thread as a submission!