The Monster From Above
Mariam Khayat’s graduate thesis film at USC, The Monster From Above is about a small fish named Red who tries to warn the other creatures of the sea about increasing amounts of trash, only to realize the humans he was trying to warn were actually causing the trash. As the lighting lead and texturing artist for the project, I developed the workflow used to generate the underwater imagery. We are using Redshift, Maya, Substance Suite, and Adobe Suite, as well as rendering in the ACES colorspace. This film is currently still under production, and all of these images are not final!
Assets
Some fish I textured
Bag I textured. Also a comp test for an infinite background (based on Z-depth AOV) with pier supports in the water.
The final sand texture I made
Exterior lighting on Mosque. I textured everything and created the HDRi.
I textured the coral with Substance Designer
Some Clips
An early flythrough render of an environment. I did the lighting and texturing.
Red gets spooked! This is a final comp test.
Here is the procedural caustics map I developed to project from above. It was made in After Effects and brought into maya via pngseq. I ended up using the UVproject node in Maya instead of the built in RedshiftCoordinates because Redshift was giving me weird precision errors. This allowed us to use these maps with RSArea Lights with no spread for both the volume and the ground diffuse pattern.