This prototype project was made to test the idea of a fish tank where users customize the look of a fish and release it into the tank.

I made the shader in Substance Designer, and it can accommodate a three-color combination for the body and a color for the eyes, mouth, and gills. The patterns are produced parametrically by changing the stripes’ size, position, and scale on the UV map and introducing noise into the striped pattern.

Caustic lighting dapples the fish through a pattern added to a light just above the model. I rendered this pattern out of after effects, combined it into a short looping series of images, and added it to the light.

The background is a lopping video I rendered in V-Ray for 3d Studio Max. Fish, light rays, and particles were also rendered in vray and added in Adobe After Effects.

The lessons learned here were applied to the Wilderverse project