The Fisherman’s Journey

My group began by listing all of our ideas for characters that wouldn’t have legs to see what potential stories we could build around them that incorporated the ‘journey’ theme. As most of our list’s ideas were sea creatures both real and fictional, we decided we wanted to do something following a fisherman’s boat that encounters many creatures on his journey.
After this meeting I made a start on designing creatures. I began with a seal as it was my favourite of the ideas. However it turned out during a meeting I couldn’t attend that my groups idea had been refined to just include a siren, fisherman, sea serpent and a fish.The next part I worked on was designing the environment for our story. I began by making a Pinterest board to gather references and research environment artists I could draw inspiration from. I included my favourite artists that I looked into in my group’s week 6 presentation:As I don’t have a lot of experience with environment design or working with landscapes and backgrounds in general, I wanted to be sure I got this right for my group as I hadn’t got to contribute much so far given my seal design wasn’t needed and the story board had already been completed before I got time to make one of my own.

I started with the rocks that would be for the siren(s) to sit on. I knew my group wanted a dark and gloomy sea inspired by Dredge so I sampled colours from the game to try out different colour palettes. Victoria suggested changing the sky to a desaturated orange, which we ended up sticking to as it was the best background for allowing all the characters to stand out against.Now that we had established a colour palette I moved onto the other area in our story, the magical fishing spot. We knew we wanted this area to look bright and tropical compared to the main ocean so I looked back to Shin Jong Hun’s work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again, I sampled colours from images to make a new colour palette. At first I thought the contrast between the tropical and gloomy water would be too stark to a desaturated my palette. However I felt something was missing and that the scale of the fishing spot was too big compared to the tiny boat.

On my second attempt I added rocks, coral and sparkles to make it feel more magical as well as making the colours more saturated again. I think this turned out well as the stark contrast makes the environment more fun and whimsical.

My next task was to start modelling the fish based on Rachel’s design:

I was conscious that this might be a challenge in that the model would need to be able to stretch big enough to eat the fisherman, so I looked into shape keys to learn how to smoothly morph the fish into a much bigger version.

With this tutorial I was able to expand the fish’s jaw to an extent but as I was still running quite behind the rest of my group, we decided I should swap with Rachel and instead model the serpent as it did not require the use of shape keys.

I started by looking at tutorials on snake models and found a helpful video demonstrating how to use a vert to form the basic shape of the serpent:

At this stage I was happy with how it was going and didn’t have any issues. I knew my group wanted our creatures to take influence from the 3D monsters in ‘Courage the Cowardly Dog’ as I wasn’t familiar with the show I looked for references and decided I should make my design more angular to reflect the dated as style seen here:

At this point I was happy with the medium I had found between too smooth looking and too low poly looking so I moved onto texturing. At first I tried using procreate to texture as it’s what I’m most familiar with to draw however I found it impossible to import my model without faces going randomly missing. I decided instead to just use substance.

It was at this stage I was told my model looked too low poly, particularly around the teeth. I went back to blender and fixed this quite easily however when I went to update my UV in substance (something I had done a few times before) I lost my work and had to start my texturing over again.

At this stage I was quite behind due to this setback as my model should have been completed and rigged. At first I found the rig much harder than I expected since its just a straight spine with a jaw and no limbs. It turned out my normals just needed flipped so overall making the rig went okay and I now had time to go back and fix my textures.

 

My second time texturing I decided to use the organic flesh material instead of stone as my group wanted our monsters to be similarly realistic and Victoria’s kraken model used the flesh material effectively to create slimy looking skin.

At first I wasn’t sure if I liked the changes made to this version however after importing it back into blender and adding the glowing eyes I thought it had come together nicely in the end.

During the classes throughout this model I found following along to be okay however once I came to animating on my own I felt I hadn’t retained as much as I’d hoped and had to take my time to figure things out again. Fortunately it was around this time I got my extension and since the rest of my group had submitted their finished work I had help on hand.

For most of the process I knew what to do, I was just very slow at doing it as animating in blender was still very new to me. Even moving cameras to where I wanted them around the scene felt tedious. It also took me some time to figure out how to properly set up the textures and outlines for Lewis’ boat and fisherman within the scene.

Fortunately I didnt have any issues with my serpent’s rig. I found the fisherman’s rig more challenging to animate with as it was so much more complex, particularly for the button press as I couldnt get his hands to meet in the middle without his arms clipping into his torso. I managed to work around this by hiding the clipping with my camera placement.

The main challenge I faced with animating was creating a wave when the serpent came up out of the water. Lewis had demonstrated for me how to make a duplication of the sea that could be edited into a wave shape in edit mode or with shape keys.

In theory this sounded like it could work for me so I started by making some simple ripples in shape keys however I found it very difficult to make them flow into each other like water at all. Additionally, I couldn’t find a way to have the foam effect Lewis had put together, also apply to the wave. I then tried using the ‘Animall’ add on to allow me to make keyframes in edit mode however this proved to be even more difficult and seemed to be very intensive for my computer as it slowed blender down to be almost unusable.

At this point I was watching every water tutorial I could find as I only had a little over a day left to animate the rest of my section.

Of all the tutorials I tried this was the only one that worked however it wasn’t able to create the large wave my group wanted, only ripples. At this point I felt I was wasting too much time on one problem and instead focused on the serpent to see if I could do something extra with it, in an attempt to make up for the wave being missing if I couldn’t find a way to make it.

Given my group didn’t have an updated storyboard for my section, I took the opportunity to play with different options. In the end I made the serpent take a second attempt at biting the boat as it speeds away, and then roar before giving up and diving back into the water. I also think this more clearly shows the Fisherman’s active role in escaping instead of the wave being what pushes him away from the serpents reach.

My last shot was quick to animate as I just wanted a simple nod reaction from the fisherman to acknowledge his success while keeping in character, as my group wanted him to remain stoic and deadpan throughout the short.

Unfortunately I ran out of time to find a way to make the wave but I think my section still turned out well for my first 3D animation project.