Environment Development

Once the concept work and designs have been produced and settled on, we began work on polygonal modelling and the building of several environments that are involved in the story plot. Below are a series of images showing the progress and some experimentation parts that I produced.

Seabed Example

Since the sea and seabed is involved with story, through some research I constructed a simple landscape of a sea floor to determine who we would have the environment appear in the final version.

Here is a screenshot of an experimental seabed using a NURBS plane and Paint Effects. Actually, I started out with a polygonal plane, then I used the sculpt tool to alter the plane in several places to make the surface bumpy. Then I added subdivision surfaces to smooth the mesh out so there were no sharp edges and then I converted it into a NURBS plane. After that was done, the Paint Effects tool was used to produce several reef like plants that would sway and move as if they were really underwater and that was accomplished by setting the Turbulence Mode to World Displacement in Template Brush Settings. The same technique was applied using hair like brushes.

This is the rendered shot of the same seabed but using a lighting technique. I produced a spot light to use in this scene because since this is set thousands feet below sea level, there would very little to no sunlight so all there would be is a spot light to see through this environment.

Sea Port

As a submersible vehicle is to be lowered in the water, we needed a location in which it can be placed so that's where I decided to develop and construct a platform that was based on several construction sites and a crane on a boat that I observed on the River Thames.

The "sea port" in progress. The main platform and a crane has been produced for this scene using a combination of duplicated polygonal cubes and cylinders. The girder of the crane is composed only of cylinders combined and then construction history is deleted to prevent certain errors and complications in the program.

The upgraded sea port in smooth shaded/wireframe mode. Some parts of the model have been combined while others that require movement are parented together. Other models like the bridge and the small building had been constructed in another scene file and imported into the main scene.

A mental ray rendered shot of the sea port with an ocean shader and physical sun and sky mode added. Simple texturing has been applied but may move on to UV texture editing at a later date.

The ocean was achieved using a fluid simulation that imitated an ocean, depending on how you set the controls of frequency, turbulence, wave width and shading, as partly shown in the image below.

Another rendered frame of a high angle shot of the sea platform.

In the rendered image above, clouds can be seen. The clouds were achieved by using a 3D fluid container node in the software, by changing the colour, frequency and density of the fluid simuation, I was able to produce realistic looking clouds that even moved if I wished to.

Below is a shot that was developed to show more of the environment but was not used in the final version of the movie.