underwater scene

the only procedural textures are the ground, the rocks and the "caustics" The rocks are a complex texture that I made ages ago, but the ground is just two shades of brown mixed together with the noise module. The caustic texture is a simmilar texture, with turbulence plugged into transparency (I think I inverted it first (*-1+1)).

I rendered this animation in 4 passes over several days on 3 machines. I rendered the background (distant plants and ground, gradient for sky), some ruined buildings using the shadow catcher in the mid distance (barely visible as the camera turns), and the foreground with fake caustics. Because the spline mesh I used to create the caustics was visible in the foreground, I rendered a mask pass with objects emissive white and the background black. I then composed them all together using a simple Python script (using PIL) and encoded using Quicktime Pro. the original is 1280x720, I posted a smaller version on the web. between the 4 render passes and source files, the whole project is about 2.5GB