Coral and Scale Development

   Time was spent correcting the UV map for the coral. The reasoning for this was an attempt to have the shader's progression up the coral correlate better with the contours of the geometry.

  The methodology seemed straightforward: Cut apart the UV map at each split zone, modify the UVs to give a flat-on shape, straighten everything out. As can be seen in the picture below, the new strategy allows the gradient map to better follow the flow of the model.

  Using a shader gives me some freedoms, as it means we do not have to completely unfold the model in order to get the desired result and anywhere that appears non-existent (such as side-on faces) on the UV plane is not stretched to moment-ruining distortion.

  A after a tweak to the shader the quality is solid enough that it can be consideredpresentable. As well as well as a sequence showing the coral growing from a bud, a turnaround was also created to show the model as it would look in the final render.

  As well as these tasks, The strange growths to the body of our fish were added to the body. The initial plan of using a lattice as discarded. This fell flat when the eye wasn't considered in the original plan, but this was compensated for, as the manual application turned out to be rather therapeutic and progressed relatively smoothly and promptly.

  Above is a breakdown of the animation, with each line being a cluster of blendshapes.

Coral Reacher Nearing Completion

  As on schedule, the coral has been assembled, staged and animated. I might look into rigging and perhaps a controls for animation purposes but at present this is the construction so far. There was talk of including a gradient on concept art and there may need to be a little of colour modification for the final model, the core animation however does appear solid.

  In terms of geometry this is not too complex a model when a single instance is around 1.8MB of data. That may multiply considerably when there are lots of these but as mentioned in an earlier post but work was put into minimising the geometry so that lots of these could be on screen at once.

The Primary Hazard

  The development of the scales generated enthusiasm. The task today was making the coral/organism that would chase after our fish. Originally the plan was to use coral, but there were a few scenes that involved the coral reaching out. Doing some research there was some similarity to the tendrils of sea anemones. Which are a lot more flexible.

  First tests however resulted in a few errors from the way the joints were placed down. These took some time to rectify and were a little annoying.

  Initial attempts at a cleaner model involved joints at every lateral edge, but I discarded this as a control group would have 30 different joints to manage.

  To cut down the number of joints, instead of one joint per lateral edge I looked into one joint for every two lateral edges, which halved the original number.

  Each joint has three controls: X, Y and Twist. One bends the joint forwards, another sideways and the twist helps with curling. It is very flexible with little deformation. Hopefully it is simple enough to be used en masse. And it should also be useful for wrapping around things.

  The final parameter I added was a length control. Unlike the others, this one control affects the entire skeleton, which could really help with any scenes of the construct launching itself at our hapless fish. 

  The coral wasn't entirely forgotten about. I have developed a fairly sound method of reproducing the branches of a tree, which are very similar to branched coral. The plan is to work in a blendshape that will have the coral branches growing from their individual points of origin. 

Testing the Alien Scales

   My primary task this afternoon was to get a working system for having a set of alien scales grow from the body of Ravine's main fish characters. To do this it was suggested to use blend-shapes, which I spent the afternoon working on in order to get the transformation right.

  The core idea was to create a layer that would go within the skin. This layer would fit to the body by being wrapped around using a lattice deformer. A rough shape for the fish's body was used in palce of them odel itself for the time being. The final setup would need more precise positioning as the scales would grow from around the eyes and sweep towards the tail as they spread.

   Because blendshapes were used, the 'duplicate special' tool was used. particularly useful when duplicating large grousp of objects.

  To give the progression a natural feel the scales should ideally look like they're growing independantly. This was achieved by giving variance as to when they would start and how quickly they would stop growing.

 This is the UV map of the scale. Structurally it appears simple but detailed enough. Woudl lower-polygon versions be useful? Perhaps on more distant shots

Fish Body Thumnails

As our current story will be quite metaphorical overall, we have decided to create fish characters that would be read as a general fish, not as a specific kind of fish. Below I have created some thumbnails of early ideas for the overall shape of our fish. Many of these are quite rough and are just there for ideas for further concepts.

Experimenting With Colour and Saturation.

The new story framework features two fish; one living near the surface of the ocean and one living within a ravine in the ocean depths. The two of them are driven towards the "centre", the ocean floor. We considered the idea that both the bottom of the ravine and the waters that meet the surface are both "unknown" zones areas, they represent somewhere mysterious, possibly scary while the ocean floor is the point of knowing; it is familiar and inviting. 

One idea we had considered for style is that the deeper you go, the less saturated the world becomes. The depths of the ravine would be black and white while near the surface would be very bright colours. I made some very quick tests below for this to test how colour could be used within the project.

    Picture one uses a basic saturation gradient, with the point of knowing being the midpoint where everything is naturally toned. Nothing glaring but nothing too dull.

    Picture two uses a modified gradient. Here there is a banding of the saturation levels going on, with the mouth of the ravine being the threshold between colour and monotone. While the difference between the open ocean and seafloor saturation levels is also a little more tightened.

    Picture three uses the same banding as picture two, but there is also a brightness filter that sharpens the colour intensity of the ravine and the ocean surface with a more muted brightness around the seabed. The idea being that the brightness adds a certain "unreality" to the area they are in. The fish that live in these areas are also more familiar with their environments, so brightness could also suggest familiarity. The ravine may be dark, pitch-black even, but to the fish that lives down there it is familiar. To the fish there's nothing uncomfortable with simply being there and the environment could reflect that.