Fishtank

A different view on aquarium subject.

Ofcourse the subject was more related to a aquarium and beautiful fishes. But instead, I envisioned this tank of fish.

Cartoon tank

Keeping it simply, use low poly, cartoon aspects.

Tiny, simple and compact. Using the basic ingredients of a tank.

Tank body UV-map

I want to add some illustrations on the tank body.

While I had only a tank and fish in mind for this project. Working on this and during my daily corana walks, I go got different ideas. Like the term Squidron instead of Squadron.

Squidron

Tank accompanied by stealthy fish.

Steurgon fish on border patroll, guarding the tank. Making it make a "squadron" composition.

Added air bubbles to enhance the underwater impression. Added tracks in the mud, using a quick sculpting session. And place my previous build Five-O-Pus model as squidron leader.

Floor material & texture

Floor water light reflection emulation.

First I started with a gradient to get a soft transition in to the background. The background is black, no light emmision and bitmap. The I added Vonoroi as a texture for water highlights.

Light beams

Light piercing through water.

Using lamp spots to creat sun rays. Introducing volumetric rendering to Eevee. Kept it at low resolution, because this eats CPU resources.

Image distortion

Lens distortion and light dispersion.

This is more to enhance the underwater feeling than real physics. It's more like looking through stained glass.

Adding details

Details in color and composition.

Adding a school of goldfish. Which acts as a contrast for the tank color and shape (triangle Five-O-Pus, tank body). The gold fish trident combination acts also a triangle shape.

Using the spotlights to enhance parts of the image details, like the "Squidforce" logo and title.

Cycles vs Eevee render test

Eevee workes best.

Because of the low lighting conditions and volumetric render aspects, I increased Cycles samples to 512 with denoising on (NML). But that resulted in blurry background details.

Increasing to 1024 Cycles samples, without denoising, shows a lot of fireflies. I could use other Cycle options but to make this work in Cycles I need to fix a lot of issues. While Eevee gave me the a fine result. So I kept using Eevee. But even with Eevee I encounter slow render speeds and crashes.

Final render

Knowing when to stop.

When having a fun challenge it is difficult to stop. Adding more and more. But sometimes, less is more. So, it ends here.

Fish tank