The Submersible

After seeing some of the nice loking underwater scenes from 'Titanic' I wanted to try to do some of my own, Part of the problem with making it look realisting is the fact that the submersible would have to carry all the lighting for the scene, so most of it would be hidden. The atmosphere helps this a geat deal since the backscatter from lights in the far side of the hull give the sub a sillouette which clearly defines its shape. Of course the asmosphere really needs plenty of CPU power and all the lights have to have falloffs (which sced doesn't support) to stop them swamping the whole image. The image has 10 lights in it which interact with the atmosphere to produce the realistic halo and make the redering incredibly slow.

So far there has been no textures appied to the object with the exception of the cockpit window - hopefully I should be able to put something inside this to make it more realistic. Although I'd prefer to add some background for it to interact with first. The Camera angle views the sub from below - possibly from an unseen sea bed.

The model was put together quickly using sced with a few extra bits aliased to overcome some of the limitations (for example in its handlig of lights).

The rendering took approximately one hour partly because the number of lights and the atmosphere made the tracing very slow. If the Atmosphere is removed then the rendering happens in a matter of seconds, but then it doesn't look realistic. A small amount of blurring was also added to the final image to make it look murkier.

Now Viewed from another angle and with most of the lights turned off, mainly to speed up rendering again the image was post processed a little to make it look a little more like it is in water.

The submarine has now entered a canyon on the seabed...

More to Come I Hope