Proof of Concept
Several props in this project were simply retextured versions of past modelling projects, but a lot of thought had to be put into the textures and colours used. I started work on retexturing the trident, for example, right as I was finishing up work on Scylla's model, so I had a vague idea of the colour palette I wanted to work with - very fantastical and obviously magical. Meanwhile, Cordelia's bass was retextured much much later, and required an entire overhaul of the UV map to get right, as well as an entirely new scroll at the top. Both original iterations used premade textures I edited slightly, and they were too photorealistic to gel with the design ethos of the project, which is decidedly more cartoony.
The magic effects required a lot of study to get right. The shield in particular needed to be able to blink in and out of existence, so I had to figure out a node set up to get the desired effect of fresnel fade in and then a material fade in, and then back out again.
This animation requires plenty of water animations, but I wanted to forgo fluid sim where I could because I didn't want the render to take too long, so I tested several ways to get water-like movement without using actual fluids. For the water spout for example, I had to find a way to cheat the water into that shape because I have very little control over the shapes fluid makes in the fluid simulation, so I created a conical mesh and rigged it to an armature to shoot out of the mouth instead of having it just sort of fall unceremoniously.
The tests you see below are some Grease Pencil experiments. I probably won't be doing the final splashes like this because it's way too time and labor intensive, but it was an important step of this process.
