Initial Ideas
In my first rotation I created a dolphin animation. I decided to continue the underwater theme with something similar and ended up on underwater caves.
I looked up images of these caves and took inspiration with their shapes as well as their colour palettes as well.
Initial Sketches
Based on the mood-board I sketched out multiple ideas with simple shapes since I was creating a low-poly model.
I decided to suspend my model as it would make it easier to look at all the details it has to offer as well as making it its own ecosystem where its own rules can apply.
The spikes, the arc and the mountains behind have been inspired from the mood-board.
The initial story I produced was of a dangerous island where all the fish and life mysteriously died with no explanation seen so far, with the ending of the story revealing the secret as to why this is the case.
Making the Model
These four progress shots shows the development from the initial cave to the end where I created the fish in the pond. There was a learning curve when shifting a square into a rock formation, but I was able to use Boolean to cut out shapes in the arc and pull-out teeth for the spikes. An unintentional look I created was with the mountains it looks like a wolf sticking its tongue out with teeth in its mouth. I wanted to go with this predator look so I created cannibal fish eating smaller fish creating the whole idea of “Cannibafishism”.
Creating a spooky colour palette
Since my idea has changed to a darker tone, as well as Halloween coming up, I turned to more of a twisted and sinister colour palette.
Rather than the original cool blue colour palette.
Making the Model
The first renders look very polished and bright. With the model looking glossy with the sky dome light, I added I decided to add some more to the storyline since it was fitting at the time.
This world is now a gummy world where to survive you eat other gummy species such as the fish eating the other fish giving more context to the cannibalism I added in the beginning.
Silhouette of the wolf and the tongue came out more with these renders however something to fix for the final render is the lighting makes it difficult to see the mouth spikes and the inside in general so in the final renders it would be best to find a different light to show off the spikes easier.
Semi-Final Renders
When I first rendered it came out with lots of noise and was very desaturated. These were generally the positions I wanted to use so I only did a few tweaks position wise in the final renders. I also had been rendering incorrectly which was why the images are very desaturated, so by asking for help I was able to render much more cleaner images in the end.
Final Renders
This is the story I wanted to tell. Firstly showing off the island from a distance with the moon in the background giving off an ominous atmosphere to it. Coming up close for the second image it has the cave almost eating the camera (or viewer), as well as looking down on you. Lastly shows what really happens on the island with the cannibalistic fish which is that the weak get eaten much like the stomach of a beast.
