Underwater Scenes In Blender

underwater scenes are pretty tricky to make but they just have this mystical quality to them and in this video i'm gonna show you a bunch of techniques to make underwater scenes in blender and i think we're gonna end up with something very special all right firstly i'm going to make a plane with subdivisions and give it some soft variation using a displaced modifier with a cloud texture on it this plane will become our ocean floor so i will make it pretty big now there are a lot of ways to create sand in blender but since we will be needing a whole bunch of textures and assets we will make use of qixel megascans if you haven't used it before it is basically a huge library of high quality assets and materials i highly recommend getting it as it is entirely free we are looking for a sand texture and this one looks pretty nice and if you link quicksilver bridge with blender you can just export directly into blender neat then we can just assign it to our ocean floor for some reason there's a bug on the materials when you import where the normal map is plugged into the alpha so just make sure to fix that while we're here we can adjust the tiling and the scale of the texture hitting ctrl c with the node wrangler addon installed we get a nice texture coordinate node then we can just adjust the scaling and there we go cool let us set dress our ocean floor a bit more maybe with some nice coral stones checking mega scans there are some great aquatic assets let's bring them in as well and scatter them around and i'm gonna cheat a little bit and bring in some pre-made ruins and hint to a sunken city oh and i totally have a tutorial on making these ruins on my channel check it out with the ruins and corals in place we got a nice set to start building our underwater atmosphere to make everything feel underwater we're gonna open up this shader editor and switch to the world shading this is where we will build our underwater volume create a principal volume node lower the density and set the color to something ocean green blues work pretty well here and set the background color to a bluish color as well this already starts giving us more of an underwater feel but we can do a tad better create a volume absorption note and mix it with the principled volume this note helps absorb all the colors and tints them towards the color you choose i found these colors to work really nicely yes the scene is already looking pretty submerged but everything looks a bit too clean we want to add some variation to the way light enters the water so we will fake breakups in the water surface and make some fake caustics as well yup fake caustics above our set will create a new plane its shadow should cover our set pretty well for this plane we will make a new material with a noise texture and give it some contrast with a ramp then we will plug this into the alpha of our principled vsdf then head over to the material settings and set the blend to alpha blend and the shadow to alpha hashed so that we can actually see the effect this is now our light cookie looking at our scene we can now see the sun shining through this plane and how it creates magical light rays through the water exactly what we want but we can take it one step further with some fake simple caustics back on our light cookie we will add a born oil noise adjust the settings ramp it up and multiply it with the noise and plug that into the alpha and we can now see the effect in our scene and it looks pretty good for now but we will do some more tweaking later i also decided to model an a millery just for fun to place it into the scene too and i gave it some nice textures from megascans as well alright and now the scene is really taking shape but it's missing something crucial fish lots and lots of fish [Music] oh can't wait let's bring in a fish texture into blender and use it as a reference to model out a nice fish we're going to have lots of them so don't make them too high poly when finished modeling we'll create a new material and plug in our fist texture into done no go to the fish unwrap it using the projection from view and then we can line up the fish pits with the texture and i create some simple roughness and bump maps from the texture as well looks great time to make it move many ways to approach this but we will be doing it the fast way with a wave modifier simply added to the fish done yeah no the settings are a bit trickier and you have to play around with the rotation of the fish to get the right alignment of the waves and the sizes so just play around with it a little bit something that looked like this worked pretty well for me then let's duplicate some friends and offset the wave time for each of them and place them in a collection called fishes now comes the fun part we're gonna use particles create a new plane a new particle system on that plane set the physics to voids with only one rule follow the leader then i'm going to create a new empty and i'm going to assign this empty as the leader for our void's particle system yes this is what we want but we're going to give the stream some twists and turns using some physics objects so we're going to create a vortex too in fact moving them around we can really play around with the look and feel of our stream and you can place them so that the particles will rotate around objects in the scene looking great i got great results from setting the strength of the vortices a bit lower and experimenting with where the leader object was now head over to the rendered options on the particles switch it to collection and select the fish's collection boom now we have beautiful fish flooring around the scene and if you want to give it some more variation you can add a turbulence to the mix also and our scene is looking great look at all those fish last thing i did here was add some seaweed from megascans like with the fish i gave each of them a wave modifier to make them sway in the ocean but for the seaweed i also created a vertex group to pin the bottom to the ground which we can then assign and invert in the wave modifier with all the seaweeds done i put them in a collection as well selected my ocean floor and created a new particle system set to hair then in the render tab i set the type to collection picked my seaweed collection played with the settings a bit adjusted the seed and now we have nice wavy seaweed in our scene ah it's pretty calming to look at actually at this point i was pretty much done in blender so i rendered out a nice shot to photoshop where i gave everything some final touches and created the final underwater scene i don't know about you guys but i ended up really liking this one if you like this process and you want to see the full raw process and get access to the blend file for this project then you can head over to our gum road and check it out well that is pretty much it for now guys i hope you enjoyed this and as always thanks for watching see you in the next one bye you

Channel: Critical Giants

Views: 66,076

Keywords: tutorial, concept art, blender, howto, visual development, concept, art, critical, eevee, cycles, learn, design, 3d, visdev, underwater, ocean, water, shader

Id: I2B-x3J0W4I

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021