The Water Simulation
The water simulation was a pain in the butt. I was researching all over the internet how to get the result that I wanted. I already worked a lot with some parts of realflow in a studio in Belgium, but I did not know how to put everything in place to get this animation. I mean, you can be familiar with your pencils when drawing a picture, but if you’re used to draw a circle, a square can give some problems. That’s why we have to keep learning to expand our skills and try for the best.
I went to many different places with my wife to research water. There are different elements about water that make it interesting and hard to reproduce. What is water doing and why do we relate to is so much. Is it the sound that makes us feel peaceful, or perhaps the motion and fluidness from the whole experience watching water flow down every angle of the stones or mountains? To capture the way water is the nicest is pretty hard. I talked to many different realflow masters like Shaun Micheal and asked them for help and guidance with this part of the project. They helped me out a lot, but in the end I did not get what I wanted completely. So I started to make different animations and tried to mix them together. I made a simulation in where the water was falling harder and another simulation with a lot more particles where the water was just peacefully falling down and let gravity do what its supposed to do.
Well i mixed all these animations up in Photoshop and still was missing something. Ofcourse i had to adjust a lot of the lighting to get it more in touch with the feeling of the scenery. Another thing that is even harder to recreate is, oxygen. These oxygen bubbles inside water in motion is what we often call foam. Foam is just a substantial part of water that is like bubbles of air that are sticking together finding their way out. Crawling all over each other.
My wife actually helped me with this. She has a great camera and she is a great photographer as well. Her work shows me the other way of seeing things. That is what a photographer makes a photographer. It is when you can capture the essence of imagery and not when you make money of a photo shoot of someone's party. The beauty of nature is the behind the scenes look. The views that is different than that part of societies that are walking by and just sit down at the same restaurant in the same country every vacation of the year.
When I was shooting footage for my video making of, she was working right along side of me to look for good “textures “for the foam of water. She was almost drifting on the water with her camera in her hand to get the essence of water. From these photo's I used some crucial parts to put in the 3 to 4 water simulation I made for the water flooding. That is how the water became as it is in the final picture.
The Mussel (shell)
All throughout the project I was calling this object the mussel. In fact this is more a shell than a mussel, but I would call this in dutch “ een mossel “ which also is not a mussel but it just felt to me like it was. While this is not very important I felt like I wanted to share why I choose this name, mussel for a shell.
This small object is all most invisible in the scene, but it was supposed to have a greater role in the whole chamber of oceans setting. When working on such an advanced scene not really keeping on to a concept sketch, you often see things that were in your head at first but they are not working out that well and you try to change it. I actually made a very high resolution shell in zbrush and used it in my scene.
There are sitting on top of the middle plank of the wooden table. In the final picture you can see them on the left side of the picture. I Don't need to tell too much about this, other than that i found this shell together with the shell i used for structuring the vase on the same beach, but not on the same day of the year.
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