Lighting

Cretaing LIGHTS in the scenery so that they give the impression of underwater misterious feeling was quite a hard job. In order to preserve all the bump maps I put on soft lights and did soft depth map shadows. To preserve some light effects on certain objects, without the rest of them to be affected, I did some LIGHT LINKING. In light effects I also created a soft FOG.

This is how scene looked like without light linking when I imported light balls:



with very low lighting:




After light's crash:




Scene with shark eggs enlightened:





scene with sea feathers enlightened:



LIGHT BALLS
First we tried to achieve lights only with textures (with incandescence and glow), but glow is a very sensitive tool and they were quickly overburnt. In order to preserve this soft colourful glow we decided to put in real LIGHTS (pint lihgts), so I adjusted the colour of each one of them (so they are a bit different one from each other), did circular transparency ramp (so they have softer glow) and also did light linking between every separate ball and light in it. So this particular light enlightens only this particular ball. If I havent done it, the scenery gets too bright too quickly. Its much easier to animate this way.