Deep Sea Tips

dEEP sEA tIPS

School of Fish

After watching Luc Besson's incredible Atlantis, I was eager to use tS fog to emulate an underwater scene. Of course, no underwater scene would be complete without fish of some sort. I didn't want to have to animate every fish individually, so I thought I'd try to get Exploder to do some of the work for me.

I started by making a simple fish model to use as 'particles' for an Exploder object, and two very simple spheres (5x5, I think) that had the vertices randomly point-edited to use as templates. The following are the steps (as best as I can remember) to generate the fish school object(s):

Import one of the spheres into Exploder.
In Options->General:

Anim. Direction, check 'Reverse' and 'Toggle'.
Path Options, check 'Accelerate'. This will prevent the school from 'bouncing' when they group together.
Set the other values as you want them. I added a Percent Rotation and have regretted it since. It makes some of the fish look like they're swimming sideways.

In Options->Gravity/Particles:

check 'Particles'
Output Options, check 'Particles Only'.
Initial Position, check 'Object Surface'.
Alter other options if you desire.

When you exit the Options dialog, it will prompt you to import a particle object. Load the fish.
Export the Exploder object (your school of fish).
Repeat above (maybe with slightly different values) for the second sphere.
Load both objects into tS. Delete any fish that intersect.
Stretch the timeline in the Animation Project Window for one of the Exploder objects so that they don't both 'explode' at the same rate.
Make the animations local. This is important as you will probably want to alter the explode rate independently of the forward motion.
Give the objects a forward motion path.
If desired, hand tweak the motion of some of the fish.

That's about it. There was a lot of trial and error involved in making my school of fish. The above steps are just broad strokes - there is a lot of fiddling around that has to be done. I'm not satisfied with my school of fish but I don't really want to hassle with making a new one.

Projected Light Texture

The rippling water effect really adds a lot of pizzaz to this animation. In this scene there is a single spotlight shining through a plane painted with an animated 32-bit targa sequence - to the left is a scaled down image of what the alpha channel looks like. This texture was laboriously made in Photoshop - unfortunately I can't really give any tips on how to recreate it because I've forgotten most of the steps. I can tell you that I used mulitple passes of Difference Clouds, brightness and contrast tweaks, and lots of layers.

I originally started out with a static texture and animated the plane it was painted on by scaling X and Y over time as well as keyframing the UV offset. This didn't look too bad, but I wanted to get it as realistic as possible. So, I made two more similar targa files and brought them into Premeire. I applied the 'Bend' filter to all three and exported 30 frames of each. I then did a cross dissolve between the three sequences to smoothy transition between them. I tried to make it loopable, but I obviously screwed up somwhere along the line because there is a rather large jump at one point in the sequence. (Note: targa sequences like this are incredibly inefficent because Adobe doesn't support targa compression. The final 45 frame sequence took up almost 60MB!)

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