Creature_the Shape of Water

Depth of the sea

These two renders describe the creature in his natural habitat. Fell into the deep of the sea, he looks at his surroundings with wonder and amazement.

I used RenderMan to make these renders, compositing in After Effects (especially to extract the self Illumination to improve the glow) and post production ( environment and bubbles) in Photoshop.

This short reel describe briefly the work's evolution (from modeling to final renders). A lot of details is seen in clay mode and also in lookdev with the AlSurface shader.

I used a few important lights to highlight the creature's shape and his details. I crafted the VRay AlSurface to create the proper skin shader and then I used a blend material to mix AlSurface and Vr Material (with only Self Illumination  activated). The most important thing was to create and paint a correct scatter and roughness  in substance painter to have an appropriate results in shading. I painted 3 levels of scattering for: blood, fat and skin and then I added these maps in the appropriate channels on AlSurface Material.

The references helped me a lot for an accurate research and specially what I extracted in the original movie. The reference resource by Luca Nemolato and Nikita Lebedev helped me to understand the anatomy and peculiarities of the character. In addition to this I chose a specific reference to recreate full 3D scene where he was into a bath tub.

Modeling

It was interesting the modeling's evolution, I started creating a Zspheres to make a blockout of the model and then to refine in the first step volumes of shape, in the second step musculature and then final details. 

I focused on hands, chest and scales details. A lot of fish's references helped me to improve and refine precisely. In addition of these the face was most important thing to sculpt as there aren't many clear references and I paid more attention to this.

Texture

In the process of texturing (in addition to make a good scattering and roughness) I extracted details and micro details thanks to the curvature and ambient occlusion maps. I painted in photoshop an alpha map to create a proper diffuse color and displacement for the eyes. I made 2 levels of emissive (one of both higher and the other one lower)  to recreate the bioluminescence of the creature.

I made various tests before to reach to definitive shader set up.

Rigging

I made a rigging of the creature on proper topology to create some poses for the renders.

A good topology allowed me to make some blend shapes of the creature's face and recreate some expression that there are in the movie, for example the eyes, mouth and some parts of jaw.

I created the blend shapes in Zbrush and then I transferred them in Maya to regularize and animate the facial movements and created a short animation of this.

Shot_Reference

For this scene I made a bit of compositing, especially for the lighting, shadows, the deep of water and regularize  some tones of the nose and lips of the creature.

I started with the creation of the camera, I found the correct focal length for this and I create the whole asset for the environment as in the original scene. Afterwards I refined the blockout and I exported the creature from Zbrush and moved it in Maya. I fixed up some parts of the face to make it match with the reference underneath. The water simulation made in Phoenix .

I made the Uvs of the asset and then I textured it. In the beginning I thought to paint bath salts in Substance painter but then I made all of this in shading in Maya.

I created the shaders for the bubbles have laid on the water's surface and the shader for the bath salts have laid on the creature's body, in the bath tub and on the floor.

I made some tests for the lighting (with the sides and not) to understand how the light is behaved.