Freshwater aquarium (final)

And the time has come to say goodbye to the aquarium. It served us well in times of learning and deep frustration, but thankfully, it will be over soon. What remains is to sort out such trivialities as creating the last fish species, adding water and sprinkling everything with post processing. How hard can it be?

To begin with, I sculpted the Zebra Angelfish. Well, it's just a clay angelfish at the moment but you catch my drift. And yes, I'm jumping ahead because I fully expect to get stuck on something further down the road. Best to get the easy things out of the way as soon as possible so that we can savor the stupid and silly ones.

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Retopologizing, UV unwrapping and normal map baking is all done, no major problems there. Good. Next on our list? Oh yes, texture maps. I should take extra care on this one, because it will be the biggest and most recognizable fish in the tank. We wouldn't want all that attention to go home disappointed, now, would we?

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Yeah, about that... Can't really say I'm very happy with how it turned out but it is the best I can do right now. I tried a bunch of different things as texture brushes. The most intuitive was to cut out a piece of an actual angelfish picture and use that. It only had one tiny drawback. It didn't work very well. For one, it imposed color of the original picture on the target mesh, which is not exactly what I wanted. As a workaround, I used the node editor to separate the markings from the color information. I succeeded, to a degree, but it still didn't look good. Finally, I turned to procedural textures and created brushes that could paint passable fish scales. Luckily from me, the fish will be fairly small in the tank. But just between us, I'll give you an honest close-up (nothing kinky, I swear).

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This will be one of the biggest leaps in the history of this blog but I'm afraid the rest of the aquarium story will have to be told in retrospect. I'm writing this on Sunday evening. The final battle has raged for two days and left me absolutely exhausted. I wish I had the sense to call this blog "Honest triumphkates" but what's done is done and you are here because you want to read all about my Blendering blunders. Make yourself comfortable, then, we are starting now...

Placing the angelfish turned out to be more demanding than I had anticipated. The tank had been pretty full at the end of week 3. One thing it didn't need was arrival of ten more fish. But they squeezed in, eventually. I shuffled them around for ages so that none of them would hog all the attention for itself. Then I turned to the water.

And boy, was that an experience. At one point (Saturday midnight, to be exact) I felt so down that I thought I wouldn't be able to finish the scene at all. 

It started quite innocent. I created a displaced glass plane and put it on top of the fish tank. 

The ensuing render was quite dark, but I had expected that. What I didn't expect was the low "water distortion" effect inside the tank. That's when a wild thought appeared, "I know! I'll create a full block of water. That is bound to help." And so I happily ran off and did just that and the result was... weird. 

It did magnificently in the distortion department, don't get me wrong, but the overall effect was... dim. It didn't let enough light through. So I created not one, but three water materials: one displaced, one not displaced, and the last one less reflective (for the sides, which now acted as perfect mirrors). 

I toyed with them for ages, before, entirely defeated, I had to call it quits and return to the "water layer on top" idea. But now I had a decent water material so I felt confident that I'd be able to finish it in no time. 

Couple of minutes later the test render finished. It didn't look terrible, no, but it sure had issues. The water layer cast sharp reflections, there were black lines where it touched the tank, and the light still couldn't get through. I fixed the first two problems (after couple more hours had passed), but there was nothing I could do to make the light as intense as it was meant to be. Tens of thousands of virtual light units, on multiple lamps, with the sun lamp present, and HDRI ruling over them all. 

Nothing. Helped. 

I put walls around the aquarium to persuade some of the delightful rays to bounce back into the tank. Nope. I added lamps and changed their type and added some more—and still, nothing. Then I remembered that to get rid of fireflies, I set the "Clamp indirect" to 0.99. Just out of curiosity, I returned it to the default 0. And lo and behold, all the light of the world came rushing into the scene. Eureka, I thought. I'm saved.

Not for long. I turned off most of the lights and dimmed the few surviving ones. I got to the point where the lighting looked decent in preview (which, by the way, took half a minute to even start up. That made the whole experience even more pleasantly long-winded.) And then I rendered it. I did not keep it for reference (it was somewhere around the Saturday midnight mark) but it was atrocious. The abundant fireflies that were so conveniently removed by Denoiser also managed to distort the scene into oblivion. All the textures were unrecognizable with their colors changed and details washed away. Deep shadows came from who-knows-where and nested themselves in the few remaining unspoiled areas.

After this I went back to clamp indirect and I clamped the hell out of it. Which, naturally, re-introduced the lighting problem. Fairly desperate, I took one light after another and adjusted its impact on the scene individually. For some reason, this helped, and right before I went to bed I had a decent render on my hands. 

Today was spent entirely on post-processing. I tried really hard to slip in a column of bubbles (produced by the non-existent water filter) but the Google gods frowned upon me and denied me access to free bubbles in sufficient quantity on a transparent background. Fairly specific request for gods, I know, but they could have at least tried...

Anyway, it is done. My first major long-term nature project is finally complete. I'll have to go and mumble it to myself a couple more times before I believe it but in the meantime I'll be thinking about the next project. There is always the shiny "next one", isn't there? Only I have no clue what it will be. Should I give animation a try? Or should I go for one of the long character modelling courses (which are, strictly speaking, not in my chosen field, but would greatly expand my grasp of the tools I need?). As always, feel free to leave me a comment below.