We had the opportunity to ask Nick Brunner some questions about his latest work, 'Underwater Life'.
Diving deep with the fishes! Imagine discovering a lost treasure aboard a pirate ship.....
Hello, I'm Nick Brunner, and I created this image using Blender, the open source 3D animation suite. Everything was rendered with the Cycles rendering engine, and the image was post processed in Photoshop CSS 15.
I hope you enjoy the image!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Hi, my name is Nick Brunner, and I am a 3D freelance artist in Lancaster, California. I have been doing 3D art with Blender for 6 years now and I have also written an eBook on learning nature in Blender.
How did you get inspired to create this work?
I love the sea. And I have always wanted to go underwater with my scenes, but before I did not know much
about underwater environments or even how to make one look realistic. So through tutorials from other
awesome Blender-heads and reference photos on Flicker I was able to get my inspiration for the scene.
What was your process to create this image?
Research! I definitely went into more research with scene than I have with other renders. I visited aquarium websites learned
how underwater photos look in real life applications and even read some talks about how Pixar made
underwater life in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory come to life. Lot’s of research :)
How long did it take you to complete it, from start to render?
All together from the research and post production and everything in between, the scene took me one week to create and
around a day to render on a GTX 980 Ti.
What was your biggest obstacle during the project?
My biggest obstacle was the volumetric rendering. Using that in an underwater application was very difficult on my computer.
To be able to see realtime results wasn’t exactly possible with fireflies. See when the sun lamp came through an object I had casting
shadows for the volumetrics, then through the water onto the scene it was difficult to see realtime lighting results.
Any tips for our readers?
Any tips I can give you the reader is that you can create anything. Just put effort into the scene and do research and talk to people.
Even read talks like I did for this scene to get more of an understanding with how real world applications can be made
within the 3D world.
