Today I decided I'd do an underwater scene in my 3d modeler. I wanted to build a whale model and incorporate it in. This was new territory for me, as I usually use the primitive shapes to model and this time I had to shape it from a mountain. Fun stuff.
The model of the whale had to be built first because creating the underwater effect would be easy (I thought).
I built a template for the whale in Paintshop then used it as a mesh in the terrain editor. My whale came out looking like some sort of Playdough sculpture, but I had spent so much time getting it to look as close as I did (did I mention this was my 1st time), I decided I would work with what I had. I smoothed the terrain of the fish thing to some sort of Mecha Hammerhead Dolphin and created skin for it in Paintshop. My mesh building skills are NOT okay and I had to adjust and adjust and adjust to get it even close to fitting.
Okay, so he's not perfect. He is my first 'baby' though, so he's a keeper. After all of this I had to create the scene. Creating the scene is simple. Very few elements involved. Getting everything looking right is time consuming. It literally took me two hours to create the deep blue sea, and it was all just adjustments on lights and meshes, combined with a crapload of rendering. I put my mecha dolphin in the foreground and then made a couple of duplicates to swim ahead.
Yeah, it didn't much look like what I had envisioned at the beginning but after I ran it through a few filters in Paintshop I got a couple of really good-looking pictures.
