Creating an Underwater Scene in 3D Studio Max
Categories: Effects, Featured
Written By: Chris
1.The ocean floor
Start by creating a plane 300 x 300, 30 length and width segments
Put a noise modifier on the plane, this will add the irregularities to the ground. Scale 40. Change the Z strength to 8.0. You can add a sand texture to the ground to add more realism. Right click on the ground plane and choose freeze selection. This will prevent you from accidentally moving the plane.
2. Camera is a must
Place a camera in your scene to a desirable view. I chose this angle to place my camera. You want to get a view that doesn’t allow you to see the outer edges, don’t worry about the far edges, we will next add a fog effect to the scene so that they wont be visible.
3. Setting fog
If you don’t have any objects to place in your underwater scene, just create a teapot and a couple of boxes so that you can properly test the fog effect. Set up three objects so that one is close to the camera, the next one is further away, and last one is the farthest away. Hit 8 to bring up the Environment and Effects dialog box. Under atmosphere select add and select Fog and hit ok. Under Fog Parameter, check fog background, type standard, far % 100.0. Choose a bluish color for the fog color.
4. The Environment Range
The environment range on the camera controls where the fog effect starts in relationship to the camera. The camera now needs to set up to receive the fog effect so the next step is setting up the environment ranges on the camera. Select the camera, under parameter choose “show” Under environment ranges. Change the far range to reach the edge of your ground plane. Anything behind the far range will become foggier and less visible. Doing a quick render, you should see that the object farthest from your camera is barely visible and the object closest to your camera is the most visible.
5. Lighting the scene
Now its time to add some lighting. This is the trickiest part to creating an underwater scene. Start my throwing in a couple omni lights surround your environment. This primary purpose is to get shadows into your scene. The omni lights don’t have to be too bright. I turned my two omni lights down to a multiplier of .5 each and gave one of them an area shadow. To do this, select Tools – Light Lister to display all of your lights in the scene. Then choose the light you want to turn on shadows and check the shadows check box.
Now to add the advanced effects to the lighting. From your left view draw out a target spotlight so that the spotlight is shining down onto your scene at an angle. Click on the modifier panel to get to the spotlight parameters.
Under General Parameters, turn on shadows and select shadow map.
Under Spotlight Parameters, increase the falloff field to soften up the spotlight. I have the Falloff/Field set to 36 and Hotspot/Beam to 13. Check atmospheric shadows, this allows the atmospherics effects to effect the shadow, since our fog is blue, then the shadows will have a bluish color.
Now here is the fun part. In order to get the caustic water effect that casts on the ground of the ocean floor, we are going to add a projector map to the spotlight. Under Advanced Effects click on the click on None button under Projector map. It will then bring up the material browser. Doubleclick on bitmap to browse for a map. You are going to apply the caustic water texture seen below.
Right click and save as if you don’t have it yet. You can use any caustic water texture you want to get different results.
Under Atmosphere and Effects, choose add, volume light, the click on setup. This will bring up the same environment dialog box you added the fog with. Make sure that you have Volume Light selected before changing the parameters. Turn the density down to around 1.5 and the max light to about 85. This is going to add a volume light to your spotlight and is going to take a while to render. Click the render button and grab a sandwich. While setting up your environment, it’s a good idea to turn this off when test rendering other effect.
6. Finishing up
The last thing you need to do is just add your objects to your scene. I added a submarine, shark, some plants and some pillars that I modeled. You can also try adding projector maps to your omni lights get various different caustic effects..
Here is my final result.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
[...] just posted a tutorial for all you 3d artists out there on how to create an underwater environment. The underwater tutorial has the step by step breakdown, but I also thought it would be useful to [...]
May 20th, 2008 at 9:36 am
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May 21st, 2008 at 8:09 am
i prefer the lighting part the rest i do not quite clear anyway gd tutorial thx
May 27th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
here’s a nice tutorial.
thank
May 30th, 2008 at 8:42 am
awesome, but thers no 3ds file??>>???>?>>pls spost it//..thnks
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:39 am
Very good tutorial..
June 17th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Esta buenisimo, me encantó. Y tan sencilla tu explicacion. Gracias!!
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June 30th, 2008 at 1:30 am
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July 18th, 2008 at 8:12 am
nice work,very good tutorials, good lighting,very helpful. thank you
October 21st, 2008 at 10:32 am
i kinda have a question to ask you… what you taught is underwater scene, what if i wanna to do a fish tank or so? should it be the same as what you did in this tutorial? or issit different?
October 21st, 2008 at 10:38 am
@nightmate
A fishtank would be different because you are not getting a hazy fog effect like you would underwater in the ocean. Fishtanks generally tend to be clear so you can see everything in the tank. Try modeling a tank and make the material for the glass haev some refraction on it. Treat it like a real fish tank and place a luminous light in the tank itself. Great idea for a new tutorial. I have tried it before but I think I can do better. Here is what I came up with.
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
soo its the same as what you teach in this tutorial just that no hazy fog and the things to add that you just told me?
November 12th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
yeah, I would try that… you can see the result I got above, but there may be a better way to do it.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
your 3d its very nice
would u give this tutorial pls…..
Thanks
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March 24th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Nice tutorial, thanks for posting it. I will post the link in our resources section.
November 4th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Nice Tutorial.Very helpful.Thank You.
February 18th, 2010 at 2:20 am
nice work,very good tutorials, good lighting,very helpful. thank you
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thanks, I loved the part with the glass ;).. fantastic!
December 31st, 2010 at 7:38 pm
I like this tutorial..but im having a problem….I cant get the Caustic effect to work..and my whole scene comes up way too blue…it looks as if thiers way to much fog…can you help me out.
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