I wanted to make my scene feel more complete so I decided to add in some extra elements. I wanted to give the feeling that the characters had discovered a abandoned treasure under the sea, so I started with making the treasure chest.
Initially I had a simpler lid for the lid of the box. There was no gold trimming on it though and I thought the design looked a little to simple so I deiced to remake it by adding a little more detail and fixing the shape of it a little to make it more appealing to look at. After I was happy with lid of the box I decided I wanted to adjust the shape of the base of the chest to look better . I used the extrude tool to get the correct shape I wanted. I was much happier with this.
Next, I worked on the coins. These were pretty simple as it was only a case of using a cylinder and hardening the edge to make a bevel around it. Then, I duplicated it lots of times to fill in the space with a lot of coins to give the impression it was full up.
The pearls were also quite simple as it was just spheres manipulated to form the shape of a necklace. The challenging part of these extra elements was capturing the motion as I wanted them to feel like they were being manipulated by the water. I had the pearls arranged in a way where they pointed upwards a little, as if caught on a current. For the coins I stacked a few teetering on the edge of the chest and then added in some which looked like the were floating down to the bottom as a coin would sink.
Next I decided to model some seaweed in blender for the environment and to help place the characters in an underwater scene. The shapes were not too difficult as it was just a case of pulling them to get the shape of seaweed which looked like it was moving in the sea. I also did a starfish as I thought this would also strengthen the location of the scene. I kept the shape quite curvy as I looked at some cartoonish references of starfish and I liked them more than the perfectly even legs and shape of the real life images I looked at, though I did start by making the shape even and then adjusting the curves to how I wanted it after as I thought this would give a better model.
After I had imported these elements into the scene and retopologized the ones made in blender I thought the scene still looked a little bit unfinished. I decided it would benefit from adding some bubbles to look like the treasure chest has just opened. This was very simple as I just used three sphere meshes and moved them to the size and position I wanted. These looked simple but I knew I wanted to apply textures in Substance to bring them to life.
