Maya Bifrost - Water Look Development

One thing that’s been on my mind since the start has been the look of water in the first and last scenes and how to make it stylised. This is because I don’t know if I want these scenes to be in the motion comic style or in real time. Having it in real time would make a separation between the Norse mythology stories and ‘real world’ more apparent – almost like someone is recalling the lore that helps them to sail.

I briefly tried doing a stylised water shader in ue4 in semester 1 that I wanted to develop further. However instead I started to learn Bifrost with Luke and at the same time learn Arnold from someone who knows what they’re doing. Previously I used V-Ray to render all my work in Honours and before that all my work was expected to be rendered out in game engine (Unity or Unreal Engine 4).

We used this tutorial video to a point:

Then I created basic ships and added textures to render out this shot:

I then took it into Adobe Premiere Pro to add some effects to it. I work in Premiere Pro over After Effects because it doesn't break my PC as AE does. After tweaking and trying out different values. These were the results:

In the second one I mixed the effect I made for the first image with it again but vertically and make the stroke smaller.

Honestly, I really like the effect that it created on the water in these tests. It’s an option to consider in the future to add stylisation in post-production. I do prefer the first image as its less noisy and more painterly that I’m looking for.