Atomic Jellyfish
That glow is not bioluminescence
This Mechimal is nuclear powered, the idea started as when thinking about autonomous machines/robots that could be used to explore the ocean. Initially I thought that the jellyfish would float on the surface with its tentacles spreading out, acting as wave energy generators and then once the batteries had charged it would dive down to explore.
Whilst I liked the concept I decided to give it a different energy source so that it could stay underwater longer and to go deeper.
In the original image I gave each jellyfish its own object index and then used this in compositing to fade each jellyfish by different amounts to create the appearance of them being obscured by slightly murky water. This time round though I instead incased the jellyfish in a sub-divided cube and created a volume material for it, simplifying the composite node setup quite a lot.
This has made the image more grainy but I think that’s ok for what is meant to be murky water, it did take quite a few tweaks and attempts though to get the brightness and colour to a point I was happy with.
An additional couple of views were rendered using a wire mesh material to create some ‘cut away’ images, which can be seen in the gallery below.
