Process

For this project’s introduction and moodboard, I drew inspiration from Victor Mosquera’s art style, aiming to capture its essence in 3D. My main goal was to improve my ability to manipulate simple textures in UV space to create various effects and lighting. Using Blender and Substance Painter, I focused on exploring how texture placement and lighting work together to build a cohesive, atmospheric look. Eventually, this piece will evolve into a music animation, where I’ll experiment with syncing visuals to sound, creating a dynamic interplay between the animation’s aesthetic and the audio experience. This project serves as both a creative exercise and an opportunity to refine my technical skills in texture, lighting, and music-driven animation.

I started about by discovering way that I could successfully create a striped texture for the rocks. I wanted these textures to be animated, so it was essential that they were procedurally made so that they could be easily manipulated. At first, I thought using a wave texture would be the best approach. Although this did work, it proved difficult to manipulate the texture and pan it across the texture coordinates. I decided to take a different approach where I stretched a noise texture across the Z axis in order to create stripes. Since the Z axis was isolated, I could successfully use the X and Y axis to manipulate the distortions of the lines. By creating three identical copies of these lines and pushing them slightly up and down in the Z axis, I was able to create subtle outlines for the stripes.

Another very important design goal for me was to make this texture look somewhat drawn using hashmarks. Again I wanted to make this procedural as it is an effect that I wanted to use on various aspects of this project. If this final product was to be a still render, I could have manually made hashmarks in Substance Painter. After lots of research and many tutorials, I found a node setup that came close to the effect I was looking for. I mapped a wave texture into a Voronoi texture to give me waves in various directions. With this in place, I used some other noise and Voronoi textures to mask out most of the wave texture, leaving me with the illusion of hashmarks. I then multiplied this output to the stripe setup above.

For the grass, I modeled a very simple low poly cylinder to instantiate. I made sure to delete all faces that would not be exposed, but I did add loop cuts in hopes of bending the grass. My goal here was for the grass to wave like coral underwater. I created a basic node setup that instantiates the grass on points generated on the ground mesh. Then, using weight paint as a mask, I can essentially "paint" where the grass is placed on the mesh. I then added a noise texture with a driver to create the effect of turbulence and wind. I was not able to figure out how to get the grass to bend rather than rotate and suspect there is a way to use curves to instantiate the cylinders using curves as a proxy. The only way I successfully did effect was rigging the sample grass, but proved to be very suboptimal and performance heavy.

I used a rigged character that I had made for a previous project. This mesh is always a good starting point for me for any humanoid figures. I decided to take the character to Substance Painter to create some very simple hand drawn effects. Although the texture is still in its draft stages, I liked the artistic workflow that Substance provides. The goal of this was to explore the power of just using base color and emission while manipulating the lighting and shading in Blender

I needed to add some better lighting a effects. I started out by creating the background by simply using gradient texture for the base color and some noise with contrast for stars. This gave my scene some better color, but the lighting was still boring. I decided that it could be interesting to have some caustics to give the illusion of an underwater scene. I started by subtracting a soft Voronoi texture from a sharper one, inverted it and distorted the output with a noise texture along the Y Axis to further create the illusion of underwater caustics. I then masked out the black and used the texture as a cookie under a spotlight. I decided to run with this underwater and added some volumetrics for the light to be absorbed and scattered, similar water. Again, I wanted this underwater effect to be subtle. Last but not least, I had to add some fish. I love boid mechanics and try and incorporate it whenever.