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CGNetworks Feature :: Reader Project
The Making of 'They Came From The Sea'
13th May 2005 - Danny Falch

I originally made this for a 3D challenge on the Danish 3D community site www.3dmaxer.dk. The piece won the contest even though it wasn't finished, but the main feel, the modeling and concept was complete. During the voting period I began to update the scene further with volume-light, fog and some post editing. I have to say that I felt good about the image when I posted ‘They came from the Sea’ on CGTalk, 3dtotal and gfxartist, and based on good, constructive criticism I updated it once again, this time with new cars, new textures, some more destruction, billboards and a subway station.

The mechanical fish have melted the poles over a period of time, slowly flooding the world and gaining world domination. People have moved out of the cities as the water was rising, the buildings have sustained only a little damage, but some rioting and looting has taken place.
All the glass is destroyed from ground level to about 20 meters up; from there further up it is only partly broken. Leaking gas is coming from the subway in bubbles.
This scene takes place shortly after the flooding and the 'mechfish' has spotted the viewer...

The original idea was to create the 'mechfish' and put in a normal underwater environment with sand, rocks and seaweed. But as I was working on the fish I wanted something bigger and a scene that would give the viewer something to think about.

The idea about the flooded city was tempting enough to get me started up on modeling the skyscrapers and the main concept took a dramatic change from a small happy shallow water 'mechfish' to a world dominating evil “bad-ass” 'mechfish' with attitude.

To give the 'mechmesh' a real 'fishy' feel I started looking for deep-sea fish on google. There are a lot of very strange fish on the bottom of the sea! I found a fish called Orange Roughie (funny name) but it does look rather roughed up...

I was also looking for underwater photos shot from deep below the surface. pointing up at the sky.

The only references showing a flooded city I could come up with was from films such as ‘Underworld’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI); 'AI' having some of the best views. I also found some photos of New York skyscrapers, streets and subway stations.

The whole scene is modeled basically in Viz 2005. The fish is made out of tubes, extruded splines, a bit of editable mesh and mesh smooth for the head. All the hydraulics are cylinders and spheres and the fins are extruded splines. So nothing fancy!

In Viz, there are no particles and no symmetry modifier like in 3ds max, so there is a lot of mirroring and copying of objects and bubbles.

The city is the same deal. Lots of extruded splines and boxes so it takes more patience than modeling skills to do the scene. I modeled everything in separate models and merged the lot into the scene.

To find the right camera angle and composition for the skyscrapers and the scene in general, I used boxes and replaced them with the finished models of the buildings.

The Making of 'They Came from the Sea' - cont...

I took the time to give each object its own textures.
The textures are made from lots of reference images found with Google and Total Textures and the bitmaps have been clone-brushed together to form the textures for each part. I wanted the 'mechfish' to look a bit roughed up and taking into consideration the fish had just taken over the world, humans would have put up a bit of a fight. The fish has a body map, a fin map for each fin, a hydraulic map, two types of rust, an outer eye map, an inner eye map and a map for the glowing line.

The Skyscrapers have about four maps each for windows, plaster, bricks, paint, sand stone and so on. The textures have changed a bit from the first version of the scene to the last, and the buildings are now more damaged and burned out. Changes to the mapping were made partly due to all the many positive and constructive critiques from the 3D forums, so thanks!

The rendering is a standard scanline, rendered in Viz2005. I was planning on using mentalray, but it didn’t work out well with this scene. I used very blue Viz sunlight, three blue omni lights with attenuation and a spot light with volume light projecting the water caustics, to give the right underwater feel.

To control the level of fog, volume light and the sea surface, the image was rendered in 3 passes, one clear, one with fog and one with the clear and the fog passes mixed and with volume light on the sea surface caustics effects. Post editing is done with some brightness and contrast adjustments, a few bubbles and algae was painted in and the eye saturation has been changed a bit.

Composition is very important in creating an image with impact! In this image I started out with some boxes instead of the skyscrapers to find the most dramatic camera angle and lighting for the scene. I worked with the sizes and placement of the skyscrapers to get as much depth as possible out of the image.

After the skyscrapers were shaped, the three fish were placed in the scene with a bit of rotating and bending. I tried to make the fish look at the viewer in a “What do you want?” kind of a way, but still using the fish to create depth and scale. The statue is creating a foreground focus along with the branches on the tree which brings the viewer closer and into the image.

Cars, rubbish, the subway entrance, streetlights and small fish are placed to bring further dynamics to the image and fill out the empty areas.

I have been working and playing in 3D ever since 3ds max 4 and I started out doing architectural renderings for a living and sci-fi for fun. I have not been posting anything for the past four or five years though.
In 2000, I started my own firm called 3d-empire, doing mainly 3D illustrations and animations of architecture and design, but also web sites, printed catalogues, design, and company expo concepts. This has taken up most of my time since. “They came from the Sea” is my first non-commercial posting on 3D community sites, since my comeback.