A whale passed by, the making of #4

Under the sea, the light is all weird and wonderful, caustics and stuff . To be able to make a believable animation it is necessary to get that too.

Luckily Blender supports volumetric rendering in the newest version. I use the cycles renderer and a volumetric backdrop.
In itself Volumetrics are not very interesting. To add some details I made one big light from above and a lot of spherical objects to create shadows.

The Light is just a plane with an Emission material. One thing to note is that the size of the plane influence the intensity of the light which is a bit weird, so be warned that this can be tweaked endlessly.

I also added some spots to give some light rays. This could also be made using some kind of texture on the plane that emits the light, but this was quicker for this particular project.

When making an animation like this its a good idea to make sure that both the lights and the shadow objects (the spheres) are animated just a little bit, so I went for just moving the spheres around randomly.

It really takes very little to make the entire scene look plausible. If you want the "Finding Nemo" Pixar quality however, it is a whole different thing.

If you want to see how I made this little clip there is more information to be found here:

Original post
part 1 making of
part 2 making of
part 3 making of

If you are really into this kind of rendering effect there is an abundance of videos on youtube that handle how to set up and render scenes using volumetric lighting. Just type "volumetric render blender" and they should pop right up.
This is the last making of post about my whale video. If there is still something, you think I didnt cover, just write it in the comments and I would be happy to put it on my Todo list.

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Im EvilHippie, a compulsive creative and jack o' trades. if you want to know more about me check out my introduction post here

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