Current Progress:

Underwater Scene (99.1% Complete) - YouTube

And now the thread:

Hi all!
I've been looking through these forums for a while now, and only recently started posting - so I thought I better contribute something of my own.

For just under two months now, I've been working on this underwater scene in UDK and I'd love to know what you guys and gals think.

UDK Underwater Scene - YouTube

(Ignore the compression - YouTube loves to butcher my videos :P)







As always, critique away and rip it apart if you like.
I'd love to know your thoughts on getting the colour grading right and some help on making the lighting better especially

I have a hard time telling why, but it doesnt feel like I'm underwater in your screenshots. At the depth of a coral reef, you tend to see the water surface from below or a gradient fog that let you imagine how deep you are, imo, and also you could have a lot more floating particles to give depth and speed to your camera travelling.

Some blur on the background would also help maybe. Dunno, random bits of crits here, hope it helps! The art seem spot on ;)

Thanks, it's always good to have a fresh set of eyes
I tried adding more than the current amount of particles, mind, and the engine just seems to top out and cease rendering any at all.
I'll have a look at creating a texture with many little pieces of dust and debre in clusters and see if that is any better, rather than emitting them all individually.

With regards to the sense of depth, I may add in another, subtle, low-lying height fog to make the water seem denser the deeper you are - based on your suggestion.

Man I love it! Great work, colours are gorgeous.

I agree with ParoXum though, it doesn't feel like your underwater really, but I don't think it's a huge problem. I think the shafts of light through the water in ParoXum's picture would complete your scene!

Keep up the hard work!

I think this is great! I bet if you do add another layer of fog it will definitely help.

Right, I've been away but I'm ready to give this some of the tweaks that you guys suggested.

I'll post up some stills tonight with a bit more murkiness to the water, changing the fog colour facing away from the light to be more of an aqua-blue. As well as this, I'll add the fog that gets denser the deeper you are as well as some more particles to really give a sense of moving through liquid

If it works well, I might turn off the engine-based god-rays and add my own static meshes as sun-shafts too. Thanks for the help guys!

Some things that I found really help to sell the underwater theme were:

1. Lots of light shafts.

2. Tint the scene towards blue as that's generally what happens as you get deeper and deeper into the ocean.

3. Put some sort of light distortion effect on the camera lens. It isn't necessarily realistic but it helps to sell the idea of being surrounded by water.

The art looks great though! It's really just the post processing and a little lighting away from looking killer...

I think this look amazing, esp. for just 2 months! I agree light shafts and some more fog would be great for this. Colors are exquisite ^_^

I had a tweak of things last night, adjusting the fog to be a bit thicker and a more aqua-ey colour as well as adding loads of tiny particles - not that the compressed video or stills do them justice
I also turned the renderer from DX11 to DX9 and it got rid of that odd shadow that the camera casts on low objects.

Underwater Scene (Updated 1) - YouTube

I'm still yet to put in those heavy light-shafts though as I'll need to set up a billboard material to make them constantly face the camera

Edit: Damnit, I forgot to upload my favourite shot of the fish and the arch before coming to work

Edit2: I think I'll add a DoF effect tonight too, to better portray distortion underwater.

No offense, but have you been snorkeling? Or SCUBA diving?

The last and second-last pictures are kinda pretty, but at best they resemble a strong blue haze 2 meters from the camera, on a beach, four meters above sea level where the tide doesn't even reach.

I've been fishing my entire life, and snorkeling as well. The vast majority of people won't be saying that, but it irks me anyway, so here's some tips:

That fish sorta looks like a fish, but sure doesn't move like a fish. Neither the motion (wobbling) nor speed (not gently cruising nor speeding off, the ONLY two speeds reef fish know) are believable.

The seaweed moves like old people dancing. In reality, most weed is about the same density as water, sometimes more, but mostly a little less, making it effectively weightless (actually a little buoyant). It's the current that makes it move and flop around, and considering the density difference and the surface area and shape, it's got next to no inertia, it's completely at the mercy of the current (which has a lot of inertia).

Why am I seeing red? We use red line because it vanishes after about 3-4 meters of water. Doesn't matter if it's vertically, horizontally, whatever. Red goes away. If you're in blue water, Red goes first, followed shortly by orange and yellow (like the sand, which is only really yellow above water and loses a lot of it's colour very quickly below water).
http://fishing.about.com/od/basicfis...ishingline.htm
Greens stay for a lot longer, if anyone's been out on Moreton Bay you'll know how green the water looks on some days)

Topography is another issue - what you've got doesn't look like a reef because it isn't shaped like a reef. Reefs are formed in a very specific way and have a distinctive shape. Much the same way a few boulders doesn't make a garden, some piles of sand and a spike doesn't make a reef. Google drop-off and in your scene work your way up from there. Working from the shore doesn't help because the only impressive things there are the deadly stonefish and small deadly octopi.


I think the biggest issue is that it's neither visually accurate nor visually impressive. If you have to take certain liberties, fine, I didn't have a problem with Finding Nemo either. And if you decide to nail a realistic part of the reef, then awesome, realistic water is a huge technical challenge and kudos for trying.


Again, no offense, but what I see is stuff done by memory when the artist hasn't seen the thing in the first place.

Thank you, Brendan for your detailed (if a little cutting) critique.

With regards to colouring of the scene, I'm having a hard time balancing realism with looking visually appealing. On the one extreme, the scene's colours look exactly like real-life, deep below the surface of water and hella blue. There is little variation for the eye and the area looks bland. On the other end of the spectrum, the scene certainly looks colourful, but it also doesn't look like it's underwater.
I'll have another tweak of colour tones tonight to see what I can get.

About the topography of the environment - the rock spire was always intended as the scene's central pivot as the area was originally supposed to be a giant man-made aquarium. I loved the idea of entranced fish swimming around a spire in their masses, and added the plants and corals to better flesh out the scene around that concept.

It isn't based off any real-world scene and even all of the plant-life was crafted from scratch, rather than photo-sourced textures.
Apologies if the scene is disappointing for you, taking an environment that you obviously feel passionate about as inspiration.

The alternative to 'appealing' is 'stunning'. You can still make one hell of an impact sticking to realism.

Take a look at these photos:


This is basically what you see on the reef, even at depths of 1m or less. Make no mistake, all the coral you see is thriving, the reds and greens etc you see in other pictures are due to big-ass camera flashes.

What makes a ref both appealing and stunning (and this applies to aquariums as well) is the life there. The feeling of a billion things all around you. The first two pics don't even have any fish, but it makes even a city like Tokyo look like the middle of nowhere by comparison.

A picture of a reef is stunning because of the colours. A swim through the reef is stunning because you can't tell where one organism ends and a million other begin.


Go for it. Blow a million polygons and a dozen 1k maps on the coral. It's got some of the coolest textures you'll ever see, that's the beauty of it.

As for the colour tones, if you can get your fog to fade out red from 100% to 0% from 0m to 2m, fade out green from 0m to 4m and fade out blue from 0m to 20m that's a start. Then, what you want to do is get your global fog colour, and fade that in over the top. That fakes the volume of the water and the particles within. Then blend (soft additive, if I recall) this with the pixel's height in world space (you'll need to tune it to the same distances). That way it fakes a light attached to the camera and the light from the sun and sky (all messed up from the surface). And the colours are solved.

The lighting is hard to fix - main lights kinda don't do shit underwater. Especially in salt water - the particles in the water reflect enough light that at least half of your lighting should be GI (based on depth if you're going for some depth variation), ambient occlusion, etc. More, the deeper you get. You can see in the middle photo the shadowing on the coral, but in the third photo the shadow strength looks a lot weaker.

Your love of the reef really does show through, Brendan

You have actually inspired me to start another scene from scratch - using the existing assets initially - at a shallower depth, focussing on realism and density.
I'll work hard to get a good range of corals and anemone as well as more than 3 fish :P

In the meantime...

I have updated my current scene to a pretty much finished state, bringing in the fog a lot closer and narrowing it's falloff to really overlay that blue colour thick.

The god-rays from the DominantDirectionalLight have been amplified and the water surface has had its bloom exponent multiplied by 50.

Underwater Scene (Updated 2) - YouTube

With these settings, the stills really don't do it justice, mind.

I think I might leave it at that fantasy feel for now and move on to something drastically different such as a cityscape.
Thanks for your help everyone!

Me again...

It seems that an environment is never truly finished, and as such I have:
- Added more intense light shafts in the water.
- Added a low-lying Fog Volume (as HeightFog actors can't stack on top of an ExponentHeightFog actor) to darken the scene the lower the camera is.
- Tweaked with lighting to create a more complimentary colour scheme with greener light shafts among other things.
- Fiddled with the character lighting on SkeletalMeshes to define them more.
- Use a SceneCapture2D texture to create a more realistic water surface as well as toning down its Bloom Exponent.

Underwater Scene (99% Complete) - YouTube

I experimented with Post-Process ColourGrading again, but it tended to wash out all contrast within the environment, which seemed to confuse the eye and draw attention nowhere.

I'm pretty happy with this, but then there is always something extra to fiddle with :P

The scene looks really nice but the dark purple fishes spin when the camera moves around. I think it's because they are camera facing particles so whenever they are at the top/bottom of the screen, they are horizontal and sometimes spaz out. Also, the glowing bits floating in the water look a bit odd. Apart from those two things, it looks really great.

Thanks urgaffel - it took me far too long to find out how to fix the barrel-rolling fish.
The solution was to use my own 1x1 static mesh plane that wasn't camera-facing.

And on that note, an update!
The fog contrast has been upped, the plankton and particles are tweaked to look less square and the fish no longer barrel-roll for no reason!

Underwater Scene (99.1% Complete) - YouTube

No critiques?

[/attentionseeking]

I have to say I really love this piece. You've done a fine job so far but I think you're overdosing on blue fog. My opinion is that it needs to be darker and less thick. Right now you've got all this solid colour, and that's just not how the ocean looks underwater (unless that solid colour is black or very dark blue). Basically you're trying to combine both worlds- the dark fade-off of a deep-sea environment and the light airy-ness of a tropical sea. Since you're making a coral reef, you've got to fade off the colour gently and not over-do the fog. But you've also got to make it so the foreground gets a little of it too, otherwise it looks like you've got seaweed that's growing on a sandy beach with no water around it.
Anyway, that' my two cents, looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

Right, I think I get what you're saying.
An issue with using fog is that it pretty much reduces to zero at the point of the camera, and the Fog Thickness just controls that falloff. There doesn't seem to be a way to eradicate that zero-fog zone right around the camera.

Perhaps a Post Process with a little desaturation and very slight blue hue might replicate this along with reducing the fog thickness.

Thanks @SasoChicken!

Not sure, to me the fog feels like it has a linear falloff while the
underwater-photos give me the impression that it is more an exponential one.

Pretty clear on near distance but drastically getting opaque at a certain distance.

I agree with SasoChicken that the fog is a bit heavy. It would make more sense in a cold water scene or a lake scene where one would expect murkier waters. In fact, I find your '80% complete' images generally more convincing than the latest. Tropical waters like your scene is set in tend to be very clear for the first 50 feet or so. When they aren't clear, the visibility drops off much more exponentially and much closer to the viewer.

Maybe instead of fog being your chief indication of the density of water, you could focus more on macroparticulates and bubbles? Bioshock 2 did some pretty convincing stuff with this.

Looking cool!

Macroparticulates, you say, @Jarm?
Would that work more as an overall particle cloud that covers the whole scene, appearing denser the further the camera looks through it? Or would it be more of a layered approach, with a denser amount of particles the lower down the camera goes such as in this Bioshock 2 screenie?



@Mr.Mint - I'll have a look into altering the fog more in-line with an exponential falloff. If there is no way to achieve this in my ExponentHeightFog actor, I'll look into post-process effect that can add fog in a similar manner to Depth of Feild.

Cheers guys!

Edit: This page is getting a bitch to load. I'll replace all the images with smaller ones.

Looking closer at reference, there appears to be a helluva lot more particles than my scene has.

It's odd, I can find hidden details in lighting and effects, and I'm able to critique other people's work well enough - but when it comes to looking at my own work, I get that tunnel vision.

MUST LOOK AT REFERENCE ALL THE TIME.

I just want to say, this looks amazing!!! How long have you been working on this? There's only a couple things that are not so much technical or aesthetic critiques, mostly just my opinions:

(1) SOUNDTRACK!!! As I was watching this, I was checking to see if my speakers were on and the volume up because I just knew there was a beautiful orchestral track that coincides with the visuals

(2) there needs to be a focal point/big reveal at the end. At first, I thought it was the sunken boat and oxygen tank(?) but when I looked down, there was still another 60sec to go. It seems to end with a silhouette of a boat and I felt that kind of weak. I was hoping there was going to be a silhouette of atlantis or something, lol. Even something like showing a vast, deep, empty ocean at the end, much like the Dropoff scene in Finding Nemo would be cool. It's "like, what you've seen is very detailed and complex, but there's a much larger ocean to explore that you won't get to see just yet" kind of thing. You really wouldn't have to make any more assets, just a few lighting effects and whatnot. But then again, that's just my humble opinion. Sorry for this long ass post, but your work has inspired me sir, and for that I applaud you.

(3) You say that you were using Bishock as a reference, and there was more particles in the image/scene than in yours. I don't think you should add any more particles honestly. In Bioshock, you are further down in the ocean than in your environment, and there is a lot more man-made items down there, and I feel like the particles are in reference to that.