Ancient Fish Market
The ancient fish display was an idea that floated in my head since ages ago, loosly based off the TV Show "Terra Nova", where they had a market selling prehistoric fish and bugs as foodstuff. Thus I wanted to portray how prehistoric marine life would be displayed in a contemporary day-to-day supermarket.
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It is presented with a straightforward PBR and Unreal rendering pipeline, using baked normals and texturing in UE ACES color space.
Automation was key to make a faster and smoother workflow, so besides using simple python scripts to help transition from greybox blocking to eventual detail rendering, PCG was also used to spawn translucent ice meshes over the opaque ice surface, adding subtle 3 dimensional effect.
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The ice surface itself was achieved with normal baking scrambled instances of ice cube meshes. The initial approach of using photographic references proved to be challenging due to the natural refraction of light with ice, which messes up the produced normal. Hence the former method was used instead and worked like a charm.
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Special thanks to Dekrosis, Adrian_ssb5, JackieCMYK for giving me opinions and feedback during the progress of this piece.
Beauty Pan
Wireframe Pan
Scaphatid Ammonites. All the ice and eye sclera also use translucent materials with refraction.
Pentanogmius. With a color scheme inspired from Mahi mahi, its roughness and metallic values are delicate to preserve its vibrant colours.
Flagellipina, based of yellow finned pompret.
For the Tuna-inspired Xiphactinus, iridescence was added to the coloration of its skin to create a natural metallic sheen.