To start off the week, I turned three of my sketches into colored images. I had picked the first one because I liked the mix between the modern architecture inspired by Namsan Tower merged with the traditional architecture of a palace. For me, this one felt perfect to incorporate some glowing lights into the surface as the building moves down into the deep edges of the ocean. With the second sketch, I liked the ghostly idea of it sitting on the edge of a precipice. It felt right for this atmosphere because of a building structure that is so traditional and sometimes lost in the evolving modern spaces around it. The last sketch was selected because it is the most deconstructed. It floats like a jellyfish and draws from the story of Sim Cheong saving her father by sacrificing herself to the Dragon King and being brought back to the world on a lotus, which is why there is a dragon pearl and traditional Korean throne.

I had compiled some references in my Miro board and took inspiration from that when applying color (https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lO4bA6s=/). Besides the first one that is more alive with its glowing surface, they are taking inspiration from statues that are stuck and discovered by divers underwater. They are more ghostly and abandoned and broken, which is seen in the lighting or broken structures.

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I have now started working on the models, but I am having trouble figuring out whether to focus on one of the settings or create a little of all of them to move through later. I started with the roof because it is pretty similar amongst all three parts minus modification in ornamentation for the three.

As suggested in class, I have moved forward with lighting while simultaneously modeling the assets. I began by looking at underwater films and animations to see how each one depicts water. In addition, I looked at clips of real underwater footage. Besides the use of blue and green to simulate water in the animations and films, there are certain traits I was noticing, like the slower movements of objects and cameras, caustic lighting and light rays, lots of haze, and continuous movement in the shots. This made me realize that having an environment that is really stationary will not do the atmosphere justice, so I will need to incorporate movements that simulate the way something would move in water. It is like in theater, besides the use of spotlights that have patterns on them, the actors also move in ways that simulate being in water, whether it is bobbing up and down, moving arms in a swimming motion, or using skates that allow them to gracefully glide across the surface.

After going through and doing some color sketches and videos to visualize what I want to do, I started working with underwater lighting. The first few renders are really dark, but start giving me some spaces to start exploring further. I was utilizing the aigobo on my spotlights and loading in a caustic image. I need to work on making it brighter without making it look like it is out of the water. The first attempt was just using spotlight and arealight and the second one had the spotlight with the caustics and used an ai sky dome light.

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When watching The Third & The Seventh by Alex Roman, I was really captivated by the amount of shots and diversity of shots around images and environments. I really liked the change between depth of field as well as the split screen to capture multiple aspects of an object at once. My current question is how much content is necessary to make something that dynamic? The need raised will be in the amount of detail and clarity for up close shots. In addition, I have three sketches of environments, so should I build more assets to have more to work with instead of limiting myself. Then I have to consider the things that need to get done and what is possible in that time.

The next step will be to start creating more depth and details to the 3D models. Also, I am looking at creating more environments to explore, so I will be bouncing back and forth between lighting atmosphere and building assets. This following week, I will be looking into how to light the scenes better as this week was more of the application of caustics and starting to research different ways it is done.

List of Resources: The following are different ways to incorporate caustics into the project.