The attached image is a work in progress. I'm going for some kind of fire/water duality thing, and while I'm happy with how the fire side is shaping up, I'm very disappointed with how the water side (bottom half) is turning out. Instead of looking like she's under water, she looks more like she was just rolled out from the morgue, especially around the face. For lighting, I'm using one white-yellow light from the front and a bright blue light from the side. I gave the white-yellow light a very soft turbulence pattern in an attempt to get a "light through ripples" effect, but instead it almost looks like bruised skin. (I'm also going to switch the hair to something dynamic to give it a bit more of a floating-in-water look, but for now I'm mostly thinking about the lighting.)

Very interesting. Have you thought of adding bubbles? Not sure which way they'd go but I usually attribute bubbles with water. And maybe some sort of seaweed? Just a few thoughts.

Look for a custic pattern for water and try adding it to the light in specular and/or diffuse in the materials room for one (or both) of your underwater lights. In P6 at least, in the materials room in you can preview "center of mass) wich should show you what it will look like on an obect.

oops the operative word there was "caustic"

something like this??

I'm fuzzy on what a "caustic" pattern would look like or how I would generate it.

Yes, that's exactly the kind of lighting effect I'm looking for. How was the pattern generated?

Message edited on: 04/27/2005 11:04

Ok, I got this with the light material shown. Note that the light must be a spotlight or the brick pattern gets spread out to infinity. It's not quite the effect you showed, but it's close. I'd still be interested in how you got it.

(I also had a second co-directional light just to give some fill in the areas that the textured light missed.)

OK.. I couldn't remeber were I got the caustic pattern I used in the example, so i made one in VIZ, so i could let you have it, without worrying about giving somebodies stuff away for free.

Anyway I tested it out too see if it would work OK for you.
Use the Jpeg in the diffuse part of your lights. You will have to play around a bit to get things to look right.. for example, I didn't make the texture seemless, so you will have to play with the u and v settings to make it bigger or smaller so you don't see the seems. (you have to uncheck the auto fit box)

heres the jpg.

Thanks!

Here's what I ended up with. Ultimately, I didn't use the caustic texture because I had a hard time tiling it seamlessly in photoshop. However, by comparing it to my brick-based texture, I was able to see what was missing and tweak until I got something about the same quality.

I ended up cheating on the background by applying the same pattern to a square on the ambient channel and just let depth-cueing fake the lighting fall-off.

Now I just need to go in and tweak the various joint morphs to make the arms/etc. look right in those poses, and the faces/expressions, and the texture tweaks, and so on and so on.

Attached Link: http://www.punchstock.com/image/itstock/6668004/large/itf004054.jpg

Just a thought, study some pictures of women underwater. Her hair seems to uniform spread out.

sorry the texture didn't work out for you, but what you came up with really looks good! Your water looks much better also. I need to look into how you did yours!

Good point about the hair. I did go look at some pictures of women underwater, which was fun in itself. I've got a couple of books by Howard Schatz, Waterdance and Pool Light, which are filled with amazing pictures of women underwater. I highly recommend them just as good photo collections.

Anyway, what I noticed about the Schatz pictures was that you could often tell how the model had just been moving based on how her hair was splayed out in the water, so I figured the key was motion. My attempt at fixing this was to bend her neck/head back in the other direction in frame 1 and then let her move back towards the desried position on the way to frame 30 as the hair dynamics were being calculated.

So, here's a closeup of her head/hair, and right-side up for once.

Hair seems "spikey" or is it just me? Good thread though, I've learned a lot.

Yeah, it's a little spikey at the base. It doesn't want to bend until the first vertex. I might be able to fiddle with that some too. (Eventually I'll stop fiddling and declare it finished.)

If I do a few more underwater images, I might try to wrap some of this up into a tutorial, but for now, here's some of the technical bits in case you want to experiment yourself.

The hair is dynamic and in two parts: the main section and a fringe along the front scalp that's different. Here are the dial values for where I varied from the defaults:

Main Hair:
Hair Length: 0.5
Length Variance: 0.2
Pull Back: 0.00015
Pull Down: -0.00010
Pull Side: 0
...
Number of Hairs: 2000
Tip Width: 0.4
Root Width: 1.0
Clumpiness: 0.2
Kink Strength: 20.0
Kink Scale: 25
Kink Delay 0.10
Verts per hair: 20
...
Gravity: -0.0004

Hair along the front:
Hair Length: 0.3
Length Variance: 0.1
Pull Back: 0.00015
Pull Down: -0.00010
Pull Side: 0
...
Number of Hairs: 1000
Tip Width: 0.4
Root Width: 1.0
Clumpiness: 0.7
Kink Strength: 20.0
Kink Scale: 25
Kink Delay 0.10
Verts per hair: 20
...
Gravity: -0.0002

The high kink strength puts a lot of curls in the hair, but the low kink scale turns it from a Vidal Sasoon nightmare into wavy hair.

Here's the MT5 file of the node-based material I used for the light:
http://www.zurg.net/dan/posertemp/UnderwaterLight.mt5
http://www.zurg.net/dan/posertemp/UnderwaterLight.png

It's a mix of two brick textures that have high degrees of turbulence and softness. To be honest, I found that the two most important bits were a) use a low-order fractal pattern to vary the turbulence on the brick pattern, and b) mix in a little of a second tighter brick patter (again with turbulence). Put together that gives you some large, convincingly chaotic light patterns along with some smaller bits of surface noise, i.e. bit waves and little waves.

The pattern has to go on a spotlight. With a finite number of bricks, the pattern becomes too spread-out on an infinite light. I made this water spotlight 400% intensity. I then added a white infinite light at 80% that ran in the same direction as the spotlight, just as a fill light for the darker parts of the water spotlight. I finished it off with a 40% intensity yellow light coming from opposite direction.

The background is a one-sided square that starts about 10 feet(?) behind her and goes up at a 45-degree angle, and I put the same light material on it as both the diffuse (at full strength) and the ambient at 0.5 strength. I turned off specular for this one. I then turned on depth cueing on the Atmosphere material with a very dark blue color (same as my background color) and set the distances at 20 and 500. That gives it that slow fade into darkness.

And of course, for the final picture, I just flipped it upside down in Photoshop to mix with the top image that came from another scene.

That's about it for now. Thanks for all the tips and help. I hope to finish this up for the weekend.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=945472

If any of you are still monitoring this thread, I wanted to point you towards the final image, which I just posted.

Thanks again for all your help and tips. I don't know how I would have gone from "before" to "after" without them.